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SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND 



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SHAKESPEARE'S 
ENGLAND 



BY / 

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WILLIAM WINTER 



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editio: 


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NEW YORK 




MACMILLAN 


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COMPANY 


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London 
1892 





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Copyright, 1892, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



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Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, U.S.A. 
Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A. 



OTjttelata 3fafo 



IN HONOUR OF EXALTED VIRTUES 

ADORNING A LIFE OF 

NOBLE ACHIEVEMENT AND PATIENT KINDNESS 

AND IN REMEMBRANCE OF 

FAITHFUL AND GENTLE FRIENDSHIP 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 



Turn meae, si quid loquar audiendum, 
Vocis accedet bona pars " 



PEEFACE. 



Beautiful and storied scenes that have 
soothed and elevated the mind naturally 
inspire a feeling of gratitude. Prompted 
by that feeling the present author has 
written this record of his rambles in Eng- 
land. It icas his wish, in dwelling upon 
the rural loveliness and the literary and 
historical associations of that delightful 
realm, to afford sympathetic guidance and 
useful suggestion to other American travel- 
lers who, like himself, might be attracted 
to roam among the shrines of the mother 
land. There is no pursuit more fascinating 
or in a high intellectual sense more remu- 
nerative ; since it serves to define and regu- 
late knowledge, to correct misapprehensions 
of fact, to broaden the mental vision, to 

7 



8 PREFACE. 

ripen and refine the judgment and the 
taste, and to fill the memory with ennobling 
recollections. These papers commemorate 
two visits to England, the first made in 
1877, the second in 1882 ; they occasion- 
ally touch upon the same place or scene as 
observed at different times; and especially 
they describe two distinct journeys, separ- 
ated by an interval of five years, through 
the region associated with the great name 
of Shakespeare. Bepetitions of the same 
reference, which now and then occur, were 
found unavoidable by the writer, but it is 
hoped that they will not be found tedious 
by the reader. Those who walk twice in 
the same pathways should be pleased, and 
not pained, to find the same wild-flowers 
growing beside them. Tfie first American 
edition of this work consisted of two vol- 
umes, published in 1879, 1881, and 1884, 
called " The Trip to England " and " Eng- 
lish Rambles." The former book was 
embellished with poetic illustrations by 
Joseph Jefferson, the famous comedian, my 



PREFACE. 9 

life-long friend. The paper on " Shake- 
speare's Home," — written to record for 
American readers the dedication of the 
Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford, — was 
first printed in " Harper's Magazine," in 
May 1879, with delicate illustrative pic- 
tures from the graceful pencil of Edwin 
Abbey. This compendium of the " Trip " 
and the "Rambles," with the title of 
" Shakespeare's England," was first pub- 
lished by David Douglas of Edinburgh. 
That title was chosen for the reason that 
the book relates largely to Warwickshire 
and because it depicts not so much the 
England of fact as the England created 
and hallowed by the spirit of her poetry, 
of which Shakespeare is the soul. Several 
months after the publication of " Shake- 
speare's England," the writer was told of 
a ivork, published many years ago, bearing 
a similar title, though relating to a different 
theme — the physical state of England in 
Shakespeare's time. He had never heard 
of it and has never seen it. The text for the 



present reprint has been carefully revised. 
To his British readers the author icould say 
that it is neither from lack of sympathy with 
the happiness around him nor from lack of 
faith in the future of his country that his 
writings have drifted toward the pathos in 
human experience and toward the hallowing 
associations of an old historic land. Tem- 
perament is the explanation of style : and 
he has written thus of England because she 
has filled his mind with beauty and his 
heart with mingled joy and sadness : and 
surely some memory of her venerable ruins, 
her ancient shrines, her rustic glens, her^ 
gleaming rivers, and her flower- spangled 
meadows will mingle with the last thoughts 
that glimmer through his brain when the 
shadows of the eternal night are falling and 

the ramble of life is done. 

W. W. 

1892. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 
I. THE VOYAGE 15 

II. THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND . . 24 

HI. GREAT HISTORIC PLACES . . 35 

IV. RAMBLES IN LONDON ... 43 

V. A VISIT TO WINDSOR ... 53 

VI. THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER . 63 

VII. WARWICK AND KENILWORTH . 73 

VIII. FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON, 81 

IX. LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS . 94 

X. RELICS OF LORD BYRON . . 104 

XI. WESTMINSTER ABBEY . . . Ill 

Xn. SHAKESPEARE'S HOME . . .122 

II 



12 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XIII. UP TO LONDON .... 181 

XIV. OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON . 188 
XV. LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON . 199 

XVI. A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN . 208 

XVII. STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY, 215 

XVIII. AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE . 224 

XIX. ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD . 233 

XX. A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY . 239 

XXI. THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE, 247 

XXn. A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT . 264 



This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
This fortress built by Nature for herself , . . . 
This precious stone set in the silver sea, . . . 
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Eng- 
land, . . . 
This laud of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, 
Dear for her reputation through the world/ 

Shakespeare. 



All that I saw returns upon my view ; 
All that I heard comes back upon my ear ; 
All that I felt this 7tioment doth renew. 

Fair land! by Time's parental love made free, 

By Social Order's watchful arms embraced, 

With uftexampled union meet in thee, 

For eye and mind, the present and the past ; 

With golden prospect for futurity, 

If that be reverenced which ought to last. 

Wordsworth. 

13 



SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. 



THE VOYAGE. 

1877. 

THE coast-line recedes and disappears, 
and night conies down upon the ocean. 
Into what dangers will the great ship 
plunge ? Through what mysterious waste 
of waters will she make her viewless path ? 
The black waves roll up around her. The 
strong blast fills her sails and whistles 
through her creaking cordage. Overhead 
the stars shine dimly amid the driving 
clouds. Mist and gloom close in the dubi- 
ous prospect, and a strange sadness settles 
upon the heart of the voyager — who has 
left his home behind, and who now seeks, 
for the first time, the land, the homes, and 
the manners of the stranger. Thoughts and 
images of the past crowd thick upon his 
remembrance. The faces of absent friends 
rise up before him, whom, perhaps, he is 

J 5 



10 THE VOYAGE. 

destined nevermore to behold. He sees 
their smiles ; he hears their voices ; he 
fancies them by familiar hearthstones, in 
the light of the evening lamps. They are 
very far away now ; and already it seems 
months instead of hours since the parting 
moment. Vain now the pang of regret for 
misunderstandings, unkindness, neglect ; 
for golden moments slighted and gentle 
courtesies left undone. He is alone upon 
the wild sea — all the more alone because 
surrounded with new faces of unknown 
companions — and the best he can do is to 
seek his lonely pillow and lie down with a 
prayer in his heart and on his lips. Never 
before did he so clearly know — never again 
will he so deeply feel — the uncertainty of 
human life and the weakness of human 
nature. Yet, as he notes the rush and 
throb of the vast ship and the noise of the 
breaking waves around her, and thinks of 
the mighty deep beneath, and the broad 
and melancholy expanse that stretches 
away on every side, he cannot miss the 
impression — grand, noble, and thrilling — 
of human courage, skill, and power. For 
this ship is the centre of a splendid conflict. 
Man and the elements are here at war ; and 
man makes conquest of the elements by 



THE VOYAGE. 1 7 

using them as weapons against themselves. 
Strong and brilliant, the head-light streams 
over the boiling surges. Lanterns gleam 
in the tops. Dark figures keep watch upon 
the prow. The officer of the night is at his 
post upon the bridge. Let danger threaten 
howsoever it may, it cannot come unawares ; 
it cannot subdue, without a tremendous 
struggle, the brave minds and hardy bodies 
that are here arrayed to meet it. With this 
thought, perhaps, the weary voyager sinks 
to sleep ; and this is his first night at 
sea. 

There is no tediousness of solitude to 
him who has within himself resources of 
thought and dream, the pleasures and pains 
of memory, the bliss and the torture of 
imagination. It is best to have few ac- 
quaintances — or none — on shipboard. 
Human companionship, at some times, and 
this is one of them, distracts by its petti- 
ness. The voyager should yield himself 
to nature now, and meet his own soul face 
to face. The routine of everyday life is 
commonplace enough, equally upon sea and 
land. But the ocean is a continual pageant, 
filling and soothing the mind with unspeak- 
able peace. Never, in even the grandest 
words of poetry, was the grandeur of the 

B 



1 8 THE VOYAGE. 

sea expressed. Its vastness, its freedom, 
its joy, and its beauty overwhelm the mind. 
All things else seem puny and momen- 
tary beside the life that this immense crea- 
tion unfolds and inspires. Sometimes it 
shines in the sun, a wilderness of shimmer- 
ing silver. Sometimes its long waves are 
black, smooth, glittering, and dangerous. 
Sometimes it seems instinct with a superb 
wrath, and its huge masses rise, and clash 
together, and break into crests of foam. 
Sometimes it is gray and quiet, as if in a 
sullen sleep. Sometimes the white mist 
broods upon it and deepens the sense of 
awful mystery by which it is forever en- 
wrapped. At night its surging billows 
are furrowed with long streaks of phos- 
phorescent fire ; or, it may be, the waves 
roll gently, under the soft light of stars ; 
or all the waste is dim, save where, beneath 
the moon, a glorious pathway, broadening 
out to the far horizon, allures and points to 
heaven. One of the most exquisite delights 
of the voyage, whether by day or night, is 
to lie upon the deck in some secluded spot, 
and look up at the tall, tapering spars as 
they sway with the motion of the ship, 
while over them the white clouds float, in 
ever-changing shapes, or the starry con- 



THE VOYAGE. 1 9 

stellations drift, in their eternal march. 
No need now of books, or newspapers, or 
talk ! The eyes are fed by every object 
they behold. The great ship, with all her 
white wings spread, careening like a tiny 
sail-boat, dips and rises, with sinuous, 
stately grace. The clank of her engines — 
fit type of steadfast industry and purpose — 
goes steadily on. The song of the sailors 
— " Give me some time to blow the man 
down" — rises in cheery melody, full of 
audacious, light-hearted thoughtlessness, 
and strangely tinged with the romance of 
the sea. Far out toward the horizon a 
school of whales come sporting and spout- 
ing along. At once, out of the distant 
bank of cloud and mist, a little vessel 
springs into view, and with convulsive 
movement — tilting up and down like the 
miniature barque upon an old Dutch clock 
— dances across the vista and vanishes into 
space. Soon a tempest bursts upon the 
calm ; and then, safe-housed from the 
fierce blast and blinding rain, the voy- 
ager exults over the stern battle of winds 
and waters and the stalwart, undaunted 
strength with which his ship bears down 
the furious floods and stems the gale. By 
and by a quiet hour is given, when, met 



20 THE VOYAGE. 

together with the companions of his journey, 
he stands in the hushed cabin and hears the 
voice of prayer and the hymn of praise, 
and, in the pauses, a gentle ripple of waves 
against the ship, which now rocks lazily 
upon the quiet deep ; and, ever and anon, 
as she dips, he can discern through her 
open ports the shining sea and the wheel- 
ing and circling gulls that have come out 
to welcome her to the shores of the old 
world. 

The present writer, when first he saw the 
distant and dim coast of Britain, felt, with 
a sense of forlorn loneliness that he was a 
stranger ; but when last he saw that coast 
he beheld it through a mist of tears and 
knew that he had parted from many cher- 
ished friends, from many of the gentlest 
men and women upon the earth, and from 
a land henceforth as dear to him as his 
own. England is a country which to see is 
to love. As you draw near to her shores 
you are pleased at once with the air of care- 
less finish and negligent grace that every- 
where overhangs the prospect. The grim, 
wind-beaten hills of Ireland have first been 
passed — hills crowned, here and there, with 
dark, fierce towers that look like strong- 
holds of ancient bandit chiefs, and cleft by 



THE VOYAGE. 21 

dim valleys that seem to promise endless 
mystery and romance, hid in their sombre 
depths. Passed also is white Queenstown, 
with its lovely little bay, its circle of green 
hillsides, and its valiant fort ; and pictur- 
esque Fastnet, with its gaily painted tower, 
has long been left behind. It is off the 
noble crags of Holyhead that the voyager 
first observes with what a deft skill the 
hand of art has here moulded nature's 
luxuriance into forms of seeming chance- 
born beauty ; and from that hour, wher- 
ever in rural England the footsteps of the 
pilgrim may roam, he will behold nothing 
but gentle rustic adornment, that has grown 
with the grass and the roses — greener grass 
and redder roses than ever we see in our 
western world ! In the English nature a 
love of the beautiful is spontaneous, and 
the operation of it is as fluent as the 
blowing of the summer wind. Portions of 
English cities, indeed, are hard and harsh 
and coarse enough to suit the most utili- 
tarian taste ; yet even in those regions of 
dreary monotony the national love of flow- 
ers will find expression, and the people, 
without being aware of it, will, in many 
odd little ways, beautify their homes and 
make their surroundings pictorial, at least 



22 THE VOYAGE. 

to stranger eyes. There is a tone of rest and 
home-like comfort even in murky Liverpool ; 
and great magnificence is there — as well of 
architecture and opulent living as of enter- 
prise and action. "Towered cities" and 
" the busy hum of men," however, are soon 
left behind by the wise traveller in England. 
A time will come for these ; but in his first 
sojourn there he soon discovers the two 
things that are utterly to absorb him — 
which cannot disappoint — and which are the 
fulfilment of all his dreams. These things 
are — the rustic loveliness of the land and 
the charm of its always vital and splendid 
antiquity. The green lanes, the thatched 
cottages, the meadows glorious with wild- 
flowers, the little churches covered with 
dark-green ivy, the Tudor gables festooned 
with roses, the devious footpaths that wind 
across wild heaths and long and lonesome 
fields, the narrow, shining rivers, brimful 
to their banks and crossed here and there 
with gray and moss-grown bridges, the 
stately elms whose low-hanging branches 
droop over a turf of emerald velvet, the 
gnarled beech-trees ' ' that wreathe their old, 
fantastic roots so high," the rooks that caw 
and circle in the air, the sweet winds that 
blow from fragrant woods, the sheep and 



THE VOYAGE. 23 

the deer that rest in shady places, the pretty 
children who cluster round the porches of 
their cleanly, cosy homes, and peep at the 
wayfarer as he passes, the numerous and 
often brilliant birds that at times fill the air 
with music, the brief, light, pleasant rains 
that ever and anon refresh the landscape — 
these are some of the everyday joys of 
rural England ; and these are wrapped in a 
climate that makes life one serene ecstasy. 
Meantime, in rich valleys or on verdant 
slopes, a thousand old castles and monas- 
teries, ruined or half in ruins, allure the 
pilgrim's gaze, inspire his imagination, 
arouse his memory, and fill his mind. The 
best romance of the past and the best real- 
ity of the present are his banquet now ; 
and nothing is wanting to the perfection of 
the feast. I thought that life could have 
but few moments of content in store for me 
like the moment — never to be forgotten ! — 
when, in the heart of London, on a perfect 
June day, I lay upon the grass in the old 
Green Park, and, for the first time, looked 
up to the towers of Westminster Abbey. 



24 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 



IT. 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

IT is not strange that Englishmen should 
be — as certainly they are — passionate 
lovers of their country ; for their country 
is, almost beyond parallel, peaceful, gentle, 
and beautiful. Even in vast London, where 
practical life asserts itself with such pro- 
digious force, the stranger is impressed, 
in every direction, with a sentiment of re- 
pose and peace. This sentiment seems to 
proceed in part from the antiquity of the 
social system here established, and in part 
from the affectionate nature of the English 
people. Here are finished towns, rural 
regions thoroughly cultivated and exqui- 
sitely adorned ; ancient architecture, crum- 
bling in slow decay ; and a soil so rich and 
pure that even in its idlest mood it lights 
itself up with flowers, just as the face of a 
sleeping child lights itself up with smiles. 
Here, also, are soft and kindly manners, 
settled principles, good laws, wise customs 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 25 

— wise, because rooted in the universal at- 
tributes of human nature ; and, above all, 
here is the practice of trying to live in a 
happy condition instead of trying to make 
a noise about it. Here, accordingly, life is 
soothed and hallowed with the comfortable, 
genial, loving spirit of home. It would, 
doubtless, be easily possible to come into 
contact here with absurd forms and per- 
nicious abuses, to observe absurd indi- 
viduals, and to discover veins of sordid 
selfishness and of evil and sorrow. But 
the things that first and most deeply im- 
press the observer of England and English 
society are their potential, manifold, and 
abundant sources of beauty, refinement, and 
peace. There are, of course, grumblers. 
Mention has been made of a person who, 
even in heaven, would complain that his 
cloud was damp and his halo a misfit. We 
cannot have perfection ; but the man who 
could not be happy in England — in so far, 
at least, as happiness depends upon external 
objects and influences — could not reason- 
ably expect to be happy anywhere. 

Summer heat is perceptible for an hour or 
two each day, but it causes no discomfort. 
Fog has refrained ; though it is understood 
to be lurking in the Irish sea and the English 



26 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

channel, and waiting for November, when 
it will drift into town and grime all the new 
paint on the London houses. Meantime, 
the sky is softly blue and full of magnifi- 
cent bronze clouds ; the air is cool, and in 
the environs of the city is fragrant with 
the scent of new-mown hay ; and the grass 
and trees in the parks — those copious and 
splendid lungs of London — are green, dewy, 
sweet, and beautiful. Persons "to the 
manner born ' ' were lately calling the sea- 
son "backward," and they went so far as 
to grumble at the hawthorn, as being less 
brilliant than in former seasons. But, in 
fact, to the unfamiliar sense, this tree of 
odorous coral has been delicious. We have 
nothing comparable with it in northern 
America, unless, perhaps, it be the elder, of 
our wild woods ; and even that, with all its 
fragrance, lacks equal charm of colour. They 
use the hawthorn, or some kindred shrub, 
for hedges in this country, and hence their 
fields are seldom disfigured with fences. As 
you ride through the land you see miles and 
miles of meadow traversed by these green 
and blooming hedgerows, which give the 
country a charm quite incommunicable in 
words. The green of the foliage — enriched 
by an uncommonly humid air and burnished 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 27 

by the sun — is in perfection, while the 
flowers bloom in such abundance that the 
whole realm is one glowing pageant. I 
saw near Oxford, on the crest of a hill, a 
single ray of at least a thousand feet of 
scarlet poppies. Imagine that glorious dash 
of colour in a green landscape lit by the af- 
ternoon sun ! Nobody could help loving a 
land that wooes him with such beauty. 

English flowers are exceptional for sub- 
stance and pomp. The roses, in particular 
— though many of them, it should be said, 
are of French breeds — surpass all others. 
It may seem an extravagance to say, but 
it is certainly true, that these rich, firm, 
brilliant flowers affect you like creatures of 
flesh and blood. They are, in this respect, 
only to be described as like nothing in the 
world so much as the bright lips and blush- 
ing cheeks of the handsome English women 
who walk among them and vie with them 
in health and loveliness. It is easy to per- 
ceive the source of those elements of warmth 
and sumptuousness that are so conspicu- 
ous in the results of English taste. It is a 
land of flowers. Even in the busiest parts 
of London the people decorate their houses 
with them, and set the sombre, fog-grimed 
fronts ablaze with scarlet and gold. These 



28 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

are the prevalent colours — radically so, for 
they have become national — and, when 
placed against the black tint with which 
this climate stains the buildings, they have 
the advantage of a vivid contrast that 
much augments their splendour. All Lon- 
don wears crape, variegated with a tracery 
of white, like lace upon a pall. In some 
instances the effect is splendidly pompous. 
There cannot be a grander artificial object 
in the world than the front of St. Paul's 
Cathedral, which is especially notable for 
this mysterious blending of light and shade. 
It is to be deplored that a climate which 
can thus beautify should also destroy ; but 
there can be no doubt that the stones of 
England are steadily defaced by the action 
of the damp atmosphere. Already the deli- 
cate carvings on the Palace of Westmin- 
ster are beginning to crumble. And yet, 
if one might judge the climate by this 
glittering July, England is a land of sun- 
shine as well as of flowers. Light comes 
before three o'clock in the morning, and it 
lasts, through a dreamy and lovely "gloam- 
ing," till nearly ten o'clock at night. The 
morning sky is usually light blue, dappled 
with slate-coloured clouds. A few large 
stars are visible then, lingering to outface 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 29 

the dawn. Cool winds whisper, and pres- 
ently they rouse the great, sleepy, old 
elms ; and then the rooks — which are the 
low comedians of the air in this region — 
begin to grumble ; and then the sun leaps 
above the horizon, and we sweep into a day 
of golden, breezy cheerfulness and comfort, 
the like of which is rarely or never known 
in New York, between June and October. 
Sometimes the whole twenty-four hours 
have drifted past, as if in a dream of light, 
and fragrance, and music. In a recent 
moonlight time there was scarce any dark- 
ness at all ; and more than once I have 
lain awake all night, within a few miles 
of Charing Cross, listening to a twitter of 
birds that is like the lapse and fall of silver 
water. It used to be difficult to under- 
stand why the London season should begin 
in May and last through most of the sum- 
mer ; it is not difficult to understand the 
custom now. 

The elements of discontent and disturb- 
ance which are visible in English society 
are found, upon close examination, to be 
merely superficial. Underneath them there 
abides a sturdy, immutable, inborn love 
of England. These croakings, grumblings, 
and bickerings do but denote the process by 



30 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

which the body politic frees itself from the 
headaches and fevers that embarrass the 
national health. The Englishman and his 
country are one ; and when the Englishman 
complains against his country it is not be- 
cause he believes that either there is or can 
be a better country elsewhere, but because 
his instinct of justice and order makes him 
crave perfection in his own. Institutions 
and principles are, with him, by nature, 
paramount to individuals ; and individuals 
only possess importance — and that condi- 
tional on abiding rectitude — who are their 
representatives. Everything is done in 
England to promote the permanence and 
beauty of the home ; and the permanence 
and beauty of the home, by a natural re- 
action, augment in the English people so- 
lidity of character and peace of life. They 
do not dwell in a perpetual fret and fume 
as to the acts, thoughts, and words of other 
nations : for the English there is absolutely 
no public opinion outside of their own land : 
they do not live for the sake of working, 
but they work for the sake of living ; and, 
as the necessary preparations for living have 
long since been completed, their country is 
at rest. This is the secret of England's 
first, and continuous, and last, and all-per- 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 3 1 

vading charm and power for the stranger 
— the charm and power to soothe. 

The efficacy of endeavouring to make a 
country a united, comfortable, and beautiful 
home for all its inhabitants, — binding every 
heart to the land by the same tie that binds 
every heart to the fireside, — is something 
well worthy to be considered, equally by 
the practical statesman and the contempla- 
tive observer. That way, assuredly, lie the 
welfare of the human race and all the tran- 
quillity that human nature — warped as it 
is by evil — will ever permit to this world. 
This endeavour has, through long ages, been 
steadily pursued in England, and one of its 
results — which is also one of its indica- 
tions — is the vast accumulation of what 
may be called home treasures in the city of 
London. The mere enumeration of them 
would fill large volumes. The description 
of them could not be completed in a lifetime. 
It was this copiousness of historic wealth 
and poetic association, combined with the 
flavour of character and the sentiment of 
monastic repose, that bound Dr. Johnson 
to Fleet Street and made Charles Lamb 
such an inveterate lover of the town. 
Except it be to correct a possible insular 
narrowness there can be no need that the 



32 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

Londoner should travel. Glorious sights, 
indeed, await him, if he journeys no further 
away than Paris ; but, aside from ostenta- 
tion, luxury, gaiety, and excitement, Paris 
will give him nothing that he may not find 
at home. The great cathedral of Notre 
Dame will awe him ; but not more than his 
own Westminster Abbey. The grandeur 
and beauty of the Madeleine will enchant 
him ; but not more than the massive so- 
lemnity and stupendous magnificence of 
St. Paul's. The embankments of the Seine 
will satisfy his taste with their symmetri- 
cal solidity; but he will not deem them 
superior in any respect to the embank- 
ments of the Thames. The Pantheon, 
the Hotel des Invalides, the Luxembourg, 
the Louvre, the Tribunal of Commerce, the 
Opera-House, — all these will dazzle and de- 
light his eyes, arousing his remembrances 
of history and firing his imagination of 
great events and persons ; but all these will 
fail to displace in his esteem the grand 
Palace of Westminster, so stately in its 
simplicity, so strong in its perfect grace ! 
He will ride through the exquisite Park 
of Monceau — one of the loveliest spots 
in Paris, — and onward to the Bois de 
Boulogne, with its sumptuous pomp of 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 33 

foliage, its romantic green vistas, its many- 
winding avenues, its hillside hermitage, 
its cascades, and its affluent lakes whereon 
the white swans beat the water with 
their joyous wings ; but his soul will still 
turn, with unshaken love and loyal prefer- 
ence to the sweetly sylvan solitude of the 
gardens of Kensington and Kew. He will 
marvel in the museums of the Louvre, 
the Luxembourg, and Cluny; and prob- 
ably he will concede that of paintings, 
whether ancient or modern, the French 
display is larger and finer than the Eng- 
lish ; but he will vaunt the British Museum 
as peerless throughout the world, and he 
will still prize his National Gallery, with 
its originals of Hogarth, Reynolds, Gains- 
borough, and Turner, its spirited, tender, 
and dreamy Murillos, and its dusky glories 
of Rembrandt. He will admire, at the 
Th6atre Francais, the photographic perfec- 
tion of French acting ; but he will be apt 
to reflect that English dramatic art, if it 
sometimes lacks finish, sometimes possesses 
nature ; and he will certainly perceive that 
the playhouse itself is not superior to either 
Her Majesty's Theatre or Covent Garden. 
He will luxuriate in the Champs Elysees, 
in the superb Boulevards, in the glittering 



34 THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 

pageant of precious jewels that blazes in 
the Rue de la Paix and the Palais Royal, 
and in that gorgeous panorama of shop- 
windows for which the French capital is 
unrivalled and famous ; and he will not 
deny that, as to brilliancy of aspect, Paris 
is prodigious and unequalled — the most 
radiant of cities — the sapphire in the crown 
of Solomon. But, when all is seen, either 
that Louis the Fourteenth created or Buon- 
aparte pillaged, — when he has taken his 
last walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, 
and mused, at the foot of the statue of 
Caesar, on that Titanic strife of monarchy 
and democracy of which France has seemed 
destined to be the perpetual theatre, — sated 
with the glitter of showy opulence and tired 
with the whirl of frivolous life he will gladly 
and gratefully turn again to his sombre, 
mysterious, thoughtful, restful old London ; 
and, like the Syrian captain, though in the 
better spirit of truth and right, declare that 
Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, 
are better than all the waters of Israel. 



GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 35 



III. 



GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 

THERE is so much to be seen in London 
that the pilgrim scarcely knows where 
to choose and certainly is perplexed by 
what Dr. Johnson called ' ' the multiplicity 
of agreeable consciousness." One spot to 
which I have many times been drawn, and 
which the mention of Dr. Johnson instantly 
calls to mind, is the stately and solemn 
place in Westminster Abbey where that 
great man's ashes are buried. Side by side, 
under the pavement of the Abbey, within a 
few feet of earth, sleep Johnson, Garrick, 
Sheridan, Henderson, Dickens, Cumberland, 
and Handel. Garrick' s wife is buried in the 
same grave with her husband. Close by, 
some brass letters on a little slab in the 
stone floor mark the last resting-place of 
Thomas Campbell. Not far off is the body 
of Macaulay; while many a stroller through 
the nave treads upon the gravestone of that 
astonishing old man Thomas Parr, who 



2,6 GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 

lived in the reigns of nine princes (1483- 
1635), and reached the great age of 152. 
All parts of Westminster Abbey impress 
the reverential mind. It is an experience 
very strange and full of awe suddenly to 
find your steps upon the sepulchres of such 
illustrious men as Burke, Pitt, Fox, and 
Grattan ; and you come, with a thrill of 
more than surprise, upon such still fresh 
antiquity as the grave of Anne Neville, the 
daughter of Warwick and Queen of Rich- 
ard the Third. But no single spot in the 
great cathedral can so enthral the imagina- 
tion as that strip of storied stone beneath 
which Garrick, Johnson, Sheridan, Hender- 
son, Cumberland, Dickens, Macaulay, Ar- 
gyle, and Handel sleep, side by side. This 
writer, when lately he visited the Abbey, 
found a chair upon the grave of Johnson, 
and sat down there to rest and muse. The 
letters on the stone are fast wearing away; 
but the memory of that sturdy champion 
of thought can never perish, as long as the 
votaries of literature love their art and 
honour the valiant genius that battled — 
through hunger, toil, and contumely — for 
its dignity and renown. It was a tender 
and right feeling that prompted the burial 
of Johnson close beside Garrick. They set 



GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 37 

out together to seek their fortune in the 
great city. They went through privation 
and trial hand in hand. Each found glory 
in a different way ; and, although parted 
afterward by the currents of fame and 
wealth, they were never sundered in affec- 
tion. It was fit they should at last find 
their rest together, under the most glorious 
roof that greets the skies of England. 

Fortune gave me a good first day at the 
Tower of London. The sky lowered. The 
air was very cold. The wind blew with 
angry gusts. The rain fell, now and then, 
in a chill drizzle. The river was dark and 
sullen. If the spirits of the dead come back 
to haunt any place they surely come back 
to haunt that one ; and this was a day for 
their presence. One dark ghost seemed 
near, at every step — the ominous shade of 
the lonely Duke of Gloster. The little room 
in which the princes are said to have been 
murdered, by his command, was shown, 
and the oratory where King Henry the 
Sixth is supposed to have met his bloody 
death, and the council chamber, in which 
Richard — after listening, in an ambush be- 
hind the arras — denounced the wretched 
Hastings. The latter place is now used as 
an armoury; but the same ceiling covers it 



38 GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 

that echoed the bitter invective of Gloster 
and the rude clamour of his soldiers, when 
their frightened victim was plucked forth 
and dragged downstairs, to be beheaded 
on " a timber-log" in the courtyard. The 
Tower is a place for such deeds, and you 
almost wonder that they do not happen 
still, in its gloomy chambers. The room 
in which the princes were killed (if killed 
indeed they were) is particularly grisly in 
aspect. It is an inner room, small and 
dark. A barred window in one of its walls 
fronts a window on the other side of the 
passage by which you approach it. This is 
but a few feet from the floor, and perhaps 
the murderers paused to look through it as 
they went to their hellish work upon the 
poor children of King Edward. The en- 
trance was pointed out to a secret passage 
by which this apartment could be ap- 
proached from the foot of the Tower. In 
one gloomy stone chamber the crown jew- 
els are exhibited, in a large glass case. 
One of the royal relics is a crown of velvet 
and gold that was made for poor Anne 
Boleyn. You may pass across the court- 
yard and pause on the spot where that 
miserable woman was beheaded, and you 
may walk thence over the ground that her 



GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 39 

last trembling footsteps traversed, to the 
round tower in which, at the close, she 
lived. Her grave is in the chancel of the 
little antique church, close by. I saw the 
cell of Kaleigh, and that direful chamber 
which is scrawled all over with the names 
and emblems of prisoners who therein suf- 
fered confinement and lingering agony, 
nearly always ending in death ; but I saw 
no sadder place than Anne Boleyn's tower. 
It seemed in the strangest way eloquent of 
mute suffering. It seemed to exhale grief 
and to plead for love and pity. Yet — 
what woman ever had greater love than was 
lavished on her? And what woman ever 
trampled more royally and recklessly upon 
human hearts ? 

The Tower of London is degraded by 
being put to commonplace uses and by 
being exhibited in a commonplace manner. 
They use the famous White Tower now as a 
store-house for arms, and it contains about 
one hundred thousand guns, besides a vast 
collection of old armour and weapons. The 
arrangement of the latter was made by 
J. R. Flanche, the dramatic author, — fa- 
mous as an antiquarian and a herald. [That 
learned, able, brilliant, and honoured gen- 
tleman died, May 29, 1880, aged 84.] Under 



40 GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 

his tasteful direction the effigies and gear 
of chivalry are displayed in such a way 
that the observer may trace the changes 
that war fashions have undergone, through 
the reigns of successive sovereigns of Eng- 
land, from the earliest period until now. A 
suit of mail worn by Henry the Eighth is 
shown, and also a suit worn by Charles the 
Eirst. The suggestiveness of both figures 
is remarkable. In a room on the second 
floor of the White Tower they keep many 
gorgeous oriental weapons, and they show 
the cloak in which General Wolfe died, on 
the Plains of Abraham. It is a gray gar- 
ment, to which the active moth has given a 
share of his assiduous attention. The most 
impressive objects to be seen there, how- 
ever, are the block and axe that were used 
in beheading the traitor lords, Kilmarnock, 
Balmerino, and Lovat, after the defeat of 
the pretender, in 1746. The block is of 
ash, and there are big and cruel dents 
upon it, showing that it was made for 
use rather than ornament. It is harmless 
enough now, and this writer was allowed 
to place his head upon it, in the manner 
prescribed for the victims of decapitation. 
The door of Raleigh's bedroom is opposite 
to these baleful relics, and it is said that 



GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 4 1 

his History of the World was written in the 
room in which these implements are now 
such conspicuous objects of gloom. 1 The 
place is gloomy and cheerless beyond ex- 
pression, and great must have been the 
fortitude of the man who bore, in that grim 
solitude, a captivity of thirteen years — 
not failing to turn it to the best account, 
by producing a book so excellent for quaint* 
ness, philosophy, and eloquence. A "beef- 
eater," arrayed in a dark tunic, trousers 
trimmed with red, and a black velvet 
hat adorned with bows of blue and red 
ribbon, precedes each group of visitors, 
and drops information and h's, from point 
to point. The centre of what was once 
the Tower Green is marked with a brass 
plate, naming Anne Boleyn and giving the 
date when she was there beheaded. They 
found her body in an elm-wood box, made 
to hold arrows, and it now rests, with the 
ashes of other noble sufferers, under the 
stones of the church of St. Peter, about fifty 
feet from the place of execution. The ghost 
of Anne Boleyn is said to haunt that part 
of the Tower where she lived, and it is like- 
wise whispered that the spectre of Lady 

1 Mauy of these relics have since been disposed 
in a different way. 



42 GREAT HISTORIC PLACES. 

Jane Grey was seen, not long ago, on the 
anniversary of the day of her execution 
[Obiit 1554], to glide out upon a balcony 
adjacent to the room in which she lodged 
during nearly eight months, at the last of 
her wasted, unfortunate, but gentle and 
noble life. [That room was in the house 
of Thomas Brydges, brother and deputy of 
Sir John Brydges, Lieutenant of the Tower, 
and its windows command an unobstructed 
view of the Tower Green, which was the 
place of the block.] It could serve no good 
purpose to relate the particulars of those 
visitations; but nobody doubts them — 
while he is in the Tower. It is a place of 
mystery and horror, notwithstanding all 
that the practical spirit of to-day has done 
to make it trivial and to cheapen its grim 
glories by association with the common- 
place. 



RAMBLES IN LONDON. 43 



IV. 

RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

ALL old cities get rich in association, as 
a matter of course and whether they 
will or no ; but London, by reason of its 
great extent as well as its great antiquity, 
is richer in association than any modern 
place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes 
a step without encountering a new object 
of interest. The walk along the Strand 
and Fleet Street, in particular, is continu- 
ally on storied ground. Old Temple Bar 
still stands (July, 1877), though "tottering 
to its fall," and marks the junction of the 
two streets. The statues of Charles the 
First and Charles the Second on its west- 
ern front would be remarkable anywhere, 
as characteristic portraits. You stand be- 
side that arch and quite forget the passing 
throng, and take no heed of the tumult 
around, as you think of Johnson and Bos- 
well leaning against the Bar after midnight 



44 RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

in the far-off times and waking the echoes 
of the Temple Garden with their frolicsome 
laughter. The Bar is carefully propped now, 
and they will nurse its age as long as they 
can ; but it is an obstruction to travel — 
and it must disappear. (It was removed 
in the summer of 1878.) They will prob- 
ably set it up, newly built, in another 
place. They have left untouched a little 
piece of the original scaffolding built around 
St. Paul's ; and that fragment of decaying 
wood may still be seen, high upon the side 
of the cathedral. The Rainbow, the Mitre, 
the Cheshire Cheese, Dolly's Chop-House, 
the Cock, and the Round Table — taverns 
or public-houses that were frequented by 
the old wits — are still extant (1877). The 
Cheshire Cheese is scarcely changed from 
what it was when Johnson, Goldsmith, and 
their comrades ate beefsteak pie and drank 
porter there, and the Doctor "tossed and 
gored several persons," as it was his cheer- 
ful custom to do. The benches in that 
room are as uncomfortable as they well 
could be ; mere ledges of well-worn wood, 
on which the visitor sits bolt upright, in 
difficult perpendicular ; but there is, proba- 
bly, nothing on earth that would induce the 
owner to alter them — and he is right. The 



RAMBLES IN LONDON 45 

conservative principle in the English mind, 
if it has saved some trash, has saved more 
treasure. At the foot of Buckingham Street, 
in the Strand, — where was situated an 
estate of George Villiers, first Duke of 
Buckingham, assassinated in 1628, whose 
tomb may be seen in the chapel of Henry 
the Seventh in Westminster Abbey, — still 
stands the slowly crumbling ruin of the old 
Water Gate, so often mentioned as the place 
where accused traitors were embarked for 
the Tower. The river, in former times, 
flowed up to that gate, but the land along 
the margin of the Thames has been re- 
deemed, and the magnificent Victoria and 
Albert embankments now border the river 
for a long distance on both sides. The Water 
Gate, in fact, stands in a little park on the 
north bank of the Thames. Not far away 
is the Adelphi Terrace, where Garrick lived 
and died (Obiit January 20th, 1779, aged 63), 
and where, on October 1st, 1822, his widow 
expired, aged 98. The house of Garrick is 
let in "chambers" now. If you walk up 
the Strand towards Charing Cross you pres- 
ently come near to the Church of St. Martin- 
in-the- Fields, which is one of the works of 
James Gibbs, a pupil of Sir Christopher 
Wren, and entirely worthy of the master's 



46 RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

hand. The fogs have stained that building 
with such a deft touch as shows the caprice 
of nature to be often better than the best de- 
sign of art. Nell Gwyn's name is connected 
with St. Martin. Her funeral occurred in 
that church, and was pompous, and no 
less a person than Tenison (afterwards 
Archbishop of Canterbury) preached the fu- 
neral sermon. 1 That prelate's dust reposes 
in Lambeth church, which can be seen, 
across the river, from this part of West- 
minster. If you walk down the Strand, 
through Temple Bar, you presently reach 
the Temple ; and there is no place in 
London where the past and the present are 
so strangely confronted as they are here. 
The venerable church, so quaint with its 
cone-pointed turrets, was sleeping in the 
sunshine when first I saw it ; sparrows 
were twittering around its spires and glid- 
ing in and out of the crevices in its ancient 
walls ; while from within a strain of organ 
music, low and sweet, trembled forth, till 
the air became a benediction and every 
common thought and feeling was chastened 
away from mind and heart. The grave of 

1 This was made the occasion of a complaint 
against him, to Queen Mary, who gently expressed 
her unshaken confidence in his goodness and truth. 



RAMBLES IN LONDON. 47 

Goldsmith is close to the pathway that skirts 
this church, on a terrace raised above the 
foundation of the building and above the 
little graveyard of the Templars that nestles 
at its base. As I stood beside the resting- 
place of that sweet poet it was impossible 
not to feel both grieved and glad : grieved 
at the thought of all he suffered, and of all 
that the poetic nature must always suffer 
before it will utter its immortal music for 
mankind : glad that his gentle spirit found 
rest at last, and that time has given him 
the crown he would most have prized — the 
affection of true hearts. A gray stone, cof- 
fin-shaped and marked with a cross, — after 
the fashion of the contiguous tombs of the 
Templars, — is imposed upon his grave. 
One surface bears the inscription, "Here 
lies Oliver Goldsmith" ; the other presents 
the dates of his birth and death. (Born 
Nov. 10, 1728 ; died April 4, 1774.) I tried 
to call up the scene of his burial, when, 
around the open grave, on that tearful 
April evening, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, 
Beauclerk, Boswell, Davies, Kelly, Palmer, 
and the rest of that broken circle, may have 
gathered to witness 

" The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid, 
And the last rites that dust to dust conveyed." 



48 RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

No place could be less romantic than 
Southwark is now ; but there are few places 
in England that possess a greater charm 
for the literary pilgrim. Shakespeare lived 
there, and it was there that he wrote for a 
theatre and made a fortune. Old London 
Bridge spanned the Thames at this point, 
in those days, and was the only road to 
the Surrey side of the river. The theatre 
stood near the end of the bridge and was 
thus easy of access to the wits and beaux 
of London. No trace of it now remains ; 
but a public-house called the Globe, which 
was its name, is standing near, and the 
old church of St. Saviour — into which 
Shakespeare must often have entered — 
still braves the storm and still resists 
the encroachments of time and change. 
In Shakespeare's day there were houses 
on each side of London Bridge ; and 
as he walked on the bank of the Thames 
he could look across to the Tower, and 
to Baynard Castle, which had been the 
residence of Richard, Duke of Gloster, and 
could see, uplifted high in air, the spire of 
old St. Paul's. The borough of Southwark 
was then but thinly peopled. Many of its 
houses, as may be seen in an old picture 
of the city, were surrounded by fields or 



RAMBLES IX LONDON. 49 

gardens; and life to its inhabitants must 
have been comparatively rural. Now it is 
packed with buildings, gridironed with rail- 
ways, crowded with people, and to the last 
degree resonant and feverish with action 
and effort. Life swarms, traffic bustles, and 
travel thunders all round the cradle of the 
British drama. The old church of St. Sav- 
iour alone preserves the sacred memory of 
the past. I made a pilgrimage to that shrine, 
in the company of Arthur Sketchley, one of 
the kindliest humourists in England. (Obiit 
November 13, 1882.) We embarked at 
Westminster Bridge and landed close by 
the church in Southwark, and we were so 
fortunate as to get permission to enter it 
without a guide. The oldest part of it is the 
Lady chapel — which, in English cathedrals, 
is almost invariably placed behind the choir. 
Through this we strolled, alone and in 
silence. Every footstep there falls upon a 
grave. The pavement is one mass of grave- 
stones ; and through the tall, stained win- 
dows of the chapel a solemn light pours in 
upon the sculptured names of men and 
women who have long been dust. In one 
corner is an ancient stone coffin — a relic 
of the Roman days of Britain. This is the 
room in which Stephen Gardiner, Bishop 

D 



50 RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

of Winchester, in the days of cruel Queen 
Mary, held his ecclesiastical court and 
doomed many a dissentient devotee to the 
rack and the fagot. Here was condemned 
John Rogers, — afterwards burnt at the 
stake in Smithfield. Queen Mary and 
Queen Elizabeth may often have entered 
this chapel. But it is in the choir that the 
pilgrim pauses with most of reverence ; for 
there, not far from the altar, he stands at 
the graves of Edmund Shakespeare, John 
Fletcher, and Philip Massinger. They ap- 
parently rest almost side by side, and only 
their names and the dates of their death 
are cut in the tablets that mark their 
sepulchres. Edmund Shakespeare, the 
younger brother of William, was an actor 
in his company, and died in 1607, aged 
twenty-seven. The great poet must have 
stood at that grave, and suffered and wept 
there ; and somehow the lover of Shake- 
speare comes very near to the heart of the 
master when he stands in that place. Mas- 
singer was buried there, March 18, 1638, 
— the parish register recording him as "a 
stranger." Fletcher — of the Beaumont and 
Fletcher alliance — was buried there, in 
1625 : Beaumont's grave is in the Abbey. 
The dust of Henslowe the manager also 



RAMBLES IN LONDON. 5 1 

rests beneath the pavement of St. Saviour's. 
Bishop Gardiner was buried there, with 
pompous ceremonial, in 1555. The great 
prelate Lancelot Andrews, commemorated 
by Milton, found his grave there, in 1626. 
The royal poet King James the First, of 
Scotland, was married there, in 1423, to 
Jane, daughter of the Earl of Somerset and 
niece of Cardinal Beaufort. In the south 
transept of the church is the tomb of John 
Gower, the old poet — whose effigy, carved 
and painted, reclines upon it and is not 
very attractive. A formal, severe aspect 
he must have had, if he resembled that 
image. The tomb has been moved from 
the spot where it first stood — a proceeding 
made necessary by a fire that destroyed 
part of the old church. It is said that 
Gower caused the tomb to be erected dur- 
ing his lifetime, so that it might be in 
readiness to receive his bones. The bones 
are lost, but the memorial remains — sacred 
to the memory of the father of English 
song. This tomb was restored by the Duke 
of Sutherland, in 1832. It is enclosed by 
a little rail made of iron spears, painted 
brown and gilded at their points. I went 
into the new part of the church, and, quite 
alone, knelt in one of the pews and long 



52 RAMBLES IN LONDON. 

remained there, overcome with thoughts of 
the past and of the transient, momentary 
nature of this our earthly life and the 
shadows that we pursue. 

One object of merriment attracts a pass- 
ing glance in Southward church. There is 
a tomb in a corner of it that commemorates 
Dr. Lockyer, a maker of patent physic, in 
the time of Charles the Second. This 
elaborate structure presents an effigy of 
the doctor, together with a sounding epi- 
taph which declares that 

" His virtues and his pills are so well known 
That envy can't confine them under stone." 

Shakespeare once lived in Clink Street, 
in the borough of South wark. Goldsmith 
practised medicine there. Chaucer came 
there, with his Canterbury Pilgrims, and 
lodged at the Tabard inn. It must have 
been a romantic region in the old times. 
It is anything but romantic now. 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 53 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

IF the beauty of England were only super- 
ficial it would produce only a superficial 
effect. It would cause a passing pleasure 
and would be forgotten. It certainly would 
not — as now in fact it does — inspire a 
deep, joyous, serene and grateful content- 
ment, and linger in the mind, a gracious 
and beneficent remembrance. The conquer- 
ing and lasting potency of it resides not 
alone in loveliness of expression but in love- 
liness of character. Having first greatly 
blessed the British Islands with the natural 
advantages of position, climate, soil, and 
products, nature has wrought their de- 
velopment and adornment as a necessary 
consequence of the spirit of their inhabit- 
ants. The picturesque variety and pastoral 
repose of the English landscape spring, in 
a considerable measure, from the imagina- 
tive taste and the affectionate gentleness of 



54 A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

the English people. The state of the coun- 
try, like its social constitution, flows from 
principles within, which are constantly 
suggested, and it steadily comforts and 
nourishes the mind with a sense of kindly 
feeling, moral rectitude, solidity, and per- 
manence. Thus in the peculiar beauty of 
England the ideal is made the actual — is 
expressed in things more than in words, 
and in things by which words are tran- 
scended. Milton's " L'Allegro," fine as it 
is, is not so fine as the scenery — the crys- 
tallised, embodied poetry — out of which it 
arose. All the delicious rural verse that 
has been written in England is only the 
excess and superflux of her own poetic 
opulence : it has rippled from the hearts of 
her poets just as the fragrance floats away 
from her hawthorn hedges. At every step 
of his progress the pilgrim through English 
scenes is impressed with this sovereign ex- 
cellence of the accomplished fact, as con- 
trasted with any words that can be said in 
its celebration. 

Among representative scenes that are 
eloquent with this instructive meaning, — 
scenes easily and pleasurably accessible 
to the traveller in what Dickens expres- 
sively called "the green, English summer 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 55 

weather," — is the region of Windsor. The 
chief features of it have often been de- 
scribed ; the charm that it exercises can 
only be suggested. To see Windsor, more- 
over, is to comprehend as at a glance the 
old feudal system, and to feel in a pro- 
found and special way the pomp of English 
character and history. More than this : it 
is to rise to the ennobling serenity that 
always accompanies broad, retrospective 
contemplation of the current of human 
affairs. In this quaint, decorous town — 
nestled at the base of that mighty and 
magnificent castle which has been the home 
of princes for more than five hundred years 
— the imaginative mind wanders over vast 
tracts of the past and beholds as in a 
mirror the pageants of chivalry, the coro- 
nations of kings, the strife of sects, the bat- 
tles of armies, the schemes of statesmen, 
the decay of transient systems, the growth 
of a rational civilisation, and the everlast- 
ing march of thought. Every prospect of 
the region intensifies this sentiment of con- 
templative grandeur. As you look from 
the castle walls your gaze takes in miles 
and miles of blooming country, sprinkled 
over with little hamlets, wherein the utmost 
stateliness of learning and rank is grace- 



56 A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

fully commingled with all that is lovely and 
soothing in rural life. Not far away rise 
the " antique towers " of Eton — 

" Where grateful science still adores 
Her Henry's holy shade." 

It was in Windsor Castle that her Henry 
was born ; and there he often held his 
court ; and it is in St. George's chapel that 
his ashes repose. In the dim distance 
stands the church of Stoke-Pogis, about 
which Gray used to wander, 

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's 
shade." 

You recognise now a deeper significance 
than ever before in the " solemn stillness " 
of the incomparable Elegy. The luminous 
twilight mood of that immortal poem — its 
pensive reverie and solemn passion — is in- 
herent in the scene ; and ycfu feel that it 
was there, and there only, that the genius 
of its exceptional author — austerely gentle 
and severely pure, and thus in perfect har- 
mony with its surroundings — could have 
been moved to that sublime strain of in- 
spiration and eloquence. Near at hand, in 
the midst of your reverie, the mellow organ 
sounds from the chapel of St. George, 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 57 

where, under "fretted vault" and over 
"long-drawn aisle," depend the ghostly, 
mouldering banners of ancient knights — 
as still as the bones of the dead- and- gone 
monarchs that crumble in the crypt below. 
In this church are many of the old kings 
and nobles of England. The handsome and 
gallant Edward the Fourth here found his 
grave ; and near it is that of the accom- 
plished Hastings — his faithful friend, to 
the last and after. Here lies the dust of the 
stalwart, impetuous, and savage Henry the 
Eighth, and here, at midnight, by the light 
of torches, they laid beneath the pavement 
the mangled body of Charles the First. As 
you stand on Windsor ramparts, pondering 
thus upon the storied past and the evanes- 
cence of "all that beauty, all that wealth 
e'er gave," your eyes rest dreamily on green 
fields far below, through which, under tall 
elms, the brimming and sparkling river 
flows on without a sound, and in which a 
few figures, dwarfed by distance, flit here 
and there, in seeming aimless idleness ; 
while, warned homeward by impending sun- 
set, the chattering birds circle and float 
around the lofty towers of the castle ; and 
delicate perfumes of seringa and jasmine are 
wafted up from dusky, unknown depths at 



58 A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

the base of its ivied steep. At such an hour 
I stood on those ramparts and saw the shy 
villages and rich meadows of fertile Berk- 
shire, all red and golden with sunset light ; 
and at such an hour I stood in the lonely 
cloisters of St. George's chapel, and heard 
the distant organ sob, and saw the sunlight 
fade up the gray walls, and felt and knew 
the sanctity of silence. Age and death 
have made this church illustrious ; but the 
spot itself has its own innate charm of 
mystical repose. 

" No use of lanterns ; and in one place lay 
Feathers and dust to-day and yesterday." 

The drive from the front of Windsor 
Castle is through a broad and stately av- 
enue, three miles in length, straight as an 
arrow and level as a standing pool ; and this 
white highway through the green and fra- 
grant sod is sumptuously embowered, from 
end to end, with double rows of magnifi- 
cent elms and oaks. The Windsor avenue, 
like the splendid chestnut grove at Bushey 
Park, long famous among the pageants of 
rural England, has often been described. 
It is after leaving this that the rambler 
comes upon the rarer beauties of Windsor 
Park and Forest. ' From the far end of the 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 59 

avenue — where, in a superb position, the 
equestrian statue of King George the Third 
rises on its massive pedestal of natural rock, 
— the road winds away, through shaded 
dell and verdant glade, past great gnarled 
beeches and under boughs of elrn, and yew, 
and oak, till its silver thread is lost in the 
distant woods. At intervals a branching 
pathway strays off to some secluded lodge, 
half hidden in foliage — the property of the 
Crown, and the rustic residence of a scion 
of the royal race. In one of those retreats 
dwelt poor old George the Third, in the 
days of his mental darkness ; and the mem- 
ory of the agonising king seems still to cast 
a shadow on the mysterious and melancholy 
house. They show you, under glass, in one 
of the lodge gardens, an enormous grape- 
vine, owned by the Queen — a vine which, 
from its single stalwart trunk, spreads its 
teeming branches, laterally, more than a 
hundred feet in each direction. So come 
use and thrift, hand in hand with romance ! 
Many an aged oak is passed, in your prog- 
ress, round which, "at still midnight," 
Heme the Hunter might yet take his 
ghostly prowl, shaking his chain "in a 
most hideous and dreadful manner." The 
wreck of the veritable Heme's Oak, it is 



60 A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

said, was rooted out, together with other 
ancient and decayed trees, in the time of 
George the Third, and in somewhat too 
literal fulfilment of his Majesty's misin- 
terpreted command. This great park is 
fourteen miles in circumference and con- 
tains nearly four thousand acres, and many 
of the youngest trees that adorn it are more 
than one hundred and fifty years old. Far 
in its heart you stroll by Virginia Water — 
an artificial lake, but faultless in its gentle 
beauty — and perceive it so deep and so 
breezy that a full-rigged ship- of- war, with 
armament, can navigate its wind-swept, 
curling billows. This lake was made by 
the sanguinary Duke of Cumberland who 
led the English forces at Culloden. In the 
dim groves that fringe its margin are many 
nests wherein pheasants are bred, to fall by 
the royal shot and to supply the royal 
table : these you may contemplate but not 
approach. At a point in your walk, seques- 
tered and lonely, they have set up and skil- 
fully disposed the fragments of a genuine 
ruined temple, brought from the remote 
East — relic perchance of "Tadmor's mar- 
ble waste," and certainly a most solemn 
memorial of the morning twilight of time. 
Broken arch, storm-stained pillar, and shat- 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 6 1 

tered column are here shrouded with moss 
and ivy ; and should you chance to see them 
as the evening shadows deepen and the 
evening whid sighs mournfully in the grass 
your fancy will not fail to drink hi the per- 
fect illusion that one of the stateliest struc- 
tures of antiquity has slowly crumbled 
where now its fragments remain. 

' ' Quaint " is a descriptive epithet that 
has been much abused, but it may, with 
absolute propriety, be applied to Windsor. 
The devious little streets there visible, and 
the carved and timber- crossed buildings, 
often of great age, are uncommonly rich in 
the expressiveness of imaginative character. 
The emotions and the fancy, equally with 
the sense of necessity and the instinct of 
use, have exercised their influence and 
uttered their spirit in the shaping and 
adornment of the town. While it con- 
stantly feeds the eye — with that pleasing 
irregularity of lines and forms which is so 
delicious and refreshing — it quite as con- 
stantly nurtures the sense of romance that 
ought to play so large a part in our 
lives, redeeming us from the tyranny of 
the commonplace and intensifying all the 
high feelings and noble aspirations that are 
possible to human nature. England con- 



62 A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 

tains many places like Windsor ; some that 
blend in even richer amplitude the ele- 
ments of quaintness, loveliness, and magnifi- 
cence. The meaning of them all is the same : 
that romance, beauty, and gentleness are 
for ever vital ; that their forces are within 
our souls, and ready and eager to find their 
way into our thoughts, actions, and cir- 
cumstances, and to brighten for every one 
of us the face of every day ; that they ought 
neither to be relegated to the distant and 
the past nor kept for our books and day- 
dreams alone ; but — in a calmer and higher 
mood than is usual in this age of universal 
mediocrity, critical scepticism, and miscel- 
laneous tumult — should be permitted to 
flow forth into our architecture, adornments, 
and customs, to hallow and preserve our an- 
tiquities, to soften our manners, to give us 
tranquillity, patience, and tolerance, to make 
our country loveable for our own hearts, 
and so to enable us to bequeath it, sure of 
love and reverence, to succeeding ages. 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 63 



VI. 

THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

THE American who, having been a care- 
ful and interested reader of English 
history, visits London for the first time, half 
expects to find the ancient city in a state 
of mild decay ; and consequently he is a 
little startled at first, upon realising that 
the present is quite as vital as ever the past 
was, and that London antiquity is, in fact, 
swathed in the robes of everyday action 
and very much alive. When, for example, 
you enter Westminster Hall — "the great 
hall of William Rufus " — you are beneath 
one of the most glorious canopies in the 
world — one that was built by Richard the 
Second, whose grave, chosen by himself, is 
in the Abbey, just across the street from 
where you stand. But this old hall is now 
only a vestibule to the Palace of West- 
minster. The Lords and the Commons of 
England, on their way to the Houses of 



64 THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

Parliament, pass every day over the spot 
on which Charles the First was tried and 
condemned, and on which occurred the 
trial of Warren Hastings. It is a mere 
thoroughfare — glorious though it be, alike 
in structure and historic renown. The Pal- 
ace Yard, near by, was the scene of the 
execution of Sir Walter Raleigh. In Bish- 
opsgate Street stands Crosby House ; the 
same to which, in Shakespeare's tragedy, 
the Duke of Gloster requests the retirement 
of Lady Anne. It is a restaurant now, 
and you may dine in the veritable throne- 
room of Richard the Third. The house of 
Cardinal Wolsey in Fleet Street is now a 
shop. Milton once lived in Golden Lane, 
and Golden Lane was a sweet and quiet 
spot. It is a dingy and dismal street now, 
and the visitor is glad to get out of it. To- 
day makes use of yesterday, all the world 
over. It is not in London, certainly, that 
you find anything — except old churches 
— mouldering in silence, solitude, and neg- 
lect. 

Those who see every day during the Par- 
liamentary session the mace that is borne 
through the lobby of the House of Com- 
mons, although they are obliged, on every 
occasion, to uncover as it passes, do not, 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 65 

probably, view that symbol with much in- 
terest. Yet it is the same mace that Oliver 
Cromwell insulted, 1 when he dissolved the 
Parliament and cried out, "Take away 
that bauble ! " I saw it one day, on its 
passage to the table of the Commons, and 
was glad to remove the hat of respect to 
what it signifies — the power and majesty 
of the free people of England. The Speaker 
of the House was walking behind it, very 
grand in his wig and gown, and the mem- 
bers trooped in at his heels to secure their 
places by being present at the opening 
prayer. A little later I was provided with 
a seat, in a dim corner, in that august 
assemblage of British senators, and could 
observe at ease their management of the 
public business. The Speaker was on his 
throne ; the mace was on its table ; the 
hats of the Commons were on their heads ; 
and over this singular, animated, impressive 
scene the waning light of a summer after- 
noon poured softly down, through the high, 
stained, and pictured windows of one of the 

1 An error. The House of Commons has had 
three maces. The first one disappeared after the 
judicial slaughter of Charles the First. The Crom- 
well mace was carried to the island of Jamaica, and 
is there preserved in a museum at Kingston. The 
third is the one now in use. 
E 



66 THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

most symmetrical halls in the world. It 
did not happen to be a day of excitement. 
The Irish members had not then begun to 
impede the transaction of business, for the 
sake of drawing attention to the everlasting 
wrongs of Ireland. Yet it was a lively day. 
Curiosity on the part of the Opposition and 
a respectful incertitude on the part of 
Her Majesty's ministers were the prevail- 
ing conditions. I had never before heard 
so many questions asked — outside of the 
French grammar — and asked to so little 
purpose. Everybody wanted to know, and 
nobody wanted to tell. Each inquirer took 
off his hat when he rose to ask, and put it 
on again when he sat down to be answered. 
Each governmental sphinx bared his brow 
when he emerged to divulge, and covered it 
again when he subsided without divulging. 
The superficial respect of these interlocutors 
for each other steadily remained, however, 
of the most deferential and considerate de- 
scription ; so that — without discourtesy — 
it was impossible not to think of Byron's 
" mildest mannered man that ever scuttled 
ship or cut a throat." Underneath this 
velvety, purring, conventional manner the 
observer could readily discern the fires of 
passion, prejudice, and strong antagonism. 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 67 

They make no parade in the House of Com- 
mons. They attend to their business. And 
upon every topic that is brought before their 
notice they have definite ideas, strong con- 
victions, and settled purposes. The topic of 
Army Estimates upon this day seemed espe- 
cially to arouse their ardour. Discussion 
of this was continually diversified by cries 
of "Oh ! " and of " Hear ! " and of "Order ! " 
and sometimes those cries smacked more of 
derision than of compliment. Many per- 
sons spoke, but no person spoke well. An 
off-hand, matter-of-fact, shambling method 
of speech would seem to be the fashion in 
the British House of Commons. I remem- 
bered the anecdote that De Quincey tells, 
about Sheridan and the young member who 
quoted Greek. It was easy to perceive how 
completely out of place the sophomore ora- 
tor would be, in that assemblage. Britons 
like better to make speeches than to hear 
them, and they will never be slaves to bad 
oratory. The moment a windy gentleman 
got the floor, and began to read a manuscript 
respecting the Indian Government, as many 
as forty Commons arose and noisily walked 
out of the House. Your pilgrim likewise 
hailed the moment of his deliverance and 
was glad to escape to the open air. 



68 THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

Books have been written to describe the 
Palace of Westminster ; but it is observable 
that this structure, however much its mag- 
nificence deserves commemorative applause, 
is deficient, as yet, in the charm of associa- 
tion. The old Palace of St. James, with its 
low, dusky walls, its round turrets, and its 
fretted battlements, is more impressive, be- 
cause history has freighted it with meaning 
and time has made it beautiful. But the 
Palace of Westminster is a splendid struc- 
ture. It covers eight acres of ground, on 
the bank of the Thames ; it contains eleven 
quadrangles and five hundred rooms ; and 
when its niches for statuary have been filled 
it will contain two hundred and twenty-six 
statues. The monuments in St. Stephen's 
Hall — into which you pass from Westmin- 
ster Hall, which has been incorporated into 
the Palace and is its only ancient and there- 
fore its most interesting feature — indicate, 
very eloquently, what a superb art gallery 
this will one day become. The statues are 
the images of Selden, Hampden, Falkland, 
Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham, 
Mansfield, Burke, Fox, Pitt, and Grattan. 
Those of Mansfield and Grattan present, 
perhaps, the most of character and power, 
making you feel that they are indubitably 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 69 

accurate portraits, and winning you by the 
charm of personality. There are statues, 
also, in Westminster Hall, commemorative 
of the Georges, William and Mary, and 
Anne ; but it is not of these you think, 
nor of any local and everyday object, when 
you stand beneath the wonderful roof of 
Richard the Second. Nearly eight hundred 
years "their cloudy wings expand" above 
that fabric, and copiously shed upon it the 
fragrance of old renown. "Richard the Sec- 
ond was deposed there : Cromwell was there 
installed Lord Protector of England : John 
Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and Strafford 
were there condemned : and it was there 
that the possible, if not usual, devotion of 
woman's heart was so touchingly displayed 
by her 

" Whose faith drew strength from death, 
And prayed her Russell up to God." 

No one can realise, without personal ex- 
perience, the number and variety of pleas- 
ures accessible to the resident of London. 
These may not be piquant to him who has 
them always within his reach. I met with 
several residents of the British capital who 
had always intended to visit the Tower but 
had never done so. But to the stranger 



70 THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

they possess a constant and keen fascina- 
tion. The Derby this year [1877] was 
thought to be comparatively a tame race ; 
but I know of one spectator who saw it 
from the top of the grand stand and who 
thought that the scene it presented was 
wonderfully brilliant. The sky had been 
overcast with dull clouds till the moment 
when the race was won ; but just as Archer, 
rising in his saddle, lifted his horse forward 
and gained the goal alone, the sun burst 
forth and shed upon the downs a sheen of 
gold, and lit up all the distant hills, and all 
the far-stretching roads that wind away 
from the region of Epsom like threads of 
silver through the green. Carrier-pigeons 
were instantly launched off to London, with 
the news of the victory of Silvio. There 
was one winner on the grand stand who 
had laid bets on Silvio, for no other reason 
than because that horse bore the prettiest 
name in the list. The Derby, like Christ- 
mas, comes but once a year ; but other al- 
lurements are almost perennial. Greenwich, 
for instance, with its white-bait dinner, in- 
vites the epicure during the best part of the 
London season. A favourite tavern is the 
Trafalgar — in which each room is named 
after some magnate of the old British navy ; 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 7 1 

and Nelson, Hardy, and Rodney are house- 
hold words. Another cheery place of resort 
is The Ship. The Hospitals are at Green- 
wich that Dr. Johnson thought to be too 
fine for a charity ; and back of these — 
which are ordinary enough now, in com- 
parison with modern structures erected for 
a kindred purpose — stands the famous 
Observatory that keeps time for Europe. 
This place is hallowed also by the grave 
of Clive and by that of Wolfe — to the 
latter of whom, however, there is a monu- 
ment in Westminster Abbey. Greenwich 
makes one think of Queen Elizabeth, who 
was born there, who often held her court 
there, and who often sailed thence, in her 
barge, up the river to Richmond — her fav- 
ourite retreat and the scene of her last days 
and her pathetic death. Few spots can 
compare with Richmond, in brilliancy of 
landscape. This place — the Shene of old 
times — was long a royal residence. The 
woods and meadows that you see from the 
terrace of the Star and Garter tavern — 
spread upon a rolling plain as far as the 
eye can reach — sparkle like emeralds ; and 
the Thames, dotted with little toy-like boats, 
shines with all the deep lustre of the blacks 
est onyx. Richmond, for those who honour 



72 THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 

genius and who love to walk in the foot- 
steps of renown, is full of interest. Dean 
Swift once had a house there, the site of 
which is still indicated Pope's rural home 
was in the adjacent village of Twickenham, 
— where it may still be seen. The poet 
Thomson long resided at Richmond, in a 
house now used as an hospital, and there he 
died. Edmund Kean and the once famous 
Mrs. Yates rest beneath Richmond church, 
and there also are the ashes of Thomson. 
As I drove through the sweetly sylvan Park 
of Richmond, in the late afternoon of a 
breezy summer day, and heard the whisper- 
ing of the great elms, and saw the gentle, 
trustful deer couched at ease in the golden 
glades, I heard all the while, in the still 
chambers of thought, the tender lament of 
Collins — which is now a prophecy fulfilled : 

" Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, 
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest; 
And oft suspend the dashing oar, 
To bid his gentle spirit rest." 



WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. J3 



VII. 
WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 

A LL the way from London to Warwick it 
-*- rained ; not heavily, but with a gentle 
fall. The gray clouds hung low over the 
landscape and softly darkened it ; so that 
meadows of scarlet and emerald, the shining 
foliage of elms, gray turret, nestled cottage 
and limpid river were as mysterious and 
evanescent as pictures seen in dreams. At 
Warwick the rain had fallen and ceased, and 
the walk from the station to the inn was on 
a road — or on a footpath by the roadside — 
still hard and damp with the water it had 
absorbed. A fresh wind blew from the 
fields, sweet with the rain and fragrant with 
the odour of leaves and flowers. The streets 
of the ancient town — entered through an 
old Norman arch — were deserted and si- 
lent. It was Sunday when I first came to 
the country of Shakespeare ; and over all 
the region there brooded a sacred stillness 
peculiar to the time and harmonious beyond 



74 WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 

utterance with the sanctity of the place. As 
I strive, after many days, to call back and 
to fix in words the impressions of that sub- 
lime experience, the same awe falls upon 
me now that fell upon me then. Nothing 
else upon earth — no natural scene, no relic 
of the past, no pageantry of the present — 
can vie with the shrine of Shakespeare, in 
power to impress, to humble, and to exalt 
the devout spirit that has been nurtured at 
the fountain of his transcendent genius. 

A fortunate way to approach Stratford- 
on-Avon is by Warwick and Kenilworth. 
Those places are not on a direct line of 
travel ; but the scenes and associations 
that they successively present are such 
as assume a symmetrical order, increase in 
interest, and grow to a delightful culmina- 
tion. Objects that Shakespeare himself 
must have seen are still visible there ; and 
little by little, in contact with these, the 
pilgrim through this haunted region is men- 
tally saturated with that atmosphere of se- 
renity and romance in which the youth of 
Shakespeare was passed, and by which his 
works and his memory are embalmed. No 
one should come abruptly upon the poet's 
home. The mind needs to be prepared for 
the impression that awaits it ; and in this 



WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 75 

gradual approach it finds preparation, both 
suitable and delicious. The luxuriance of 
the country, its fertile fields, its brilliant 
foliage, its myriads of wild-flowers, its pomp 
of colour and of physical vigour and bloom, 
do not fail to announce, to every mind, 
howsoever heedless, that this is a fit place 
for the birth and nurture of a great man. 
But this is not all. As you stroll in the 
quaint streets of Warwick, as you drive to 
Kenil worth, as you muse in that poetic 
ruin, as you pause hi the old graveyard in 
the valley below, as you meditate over the 
crumbling fragments of the ancient abbey, 
at every step of the way you are haunted 
by a vague sense of an impending grandeur ; 
you are aware of a presence that fills and 
sanctifies the scene. The emotion that is 
thus inspired is very glorious ; never to be 
elsewhere felt ; and never to be forgotten. 

The cyclopaedias and the guide-books 
dilate, with much particularity and char- 
acteristic eloquence, upon Warwick Castle 
and other great features of Warwickshire, 
but the attribute that all such records 
omit is the atmosphere ; and this, perhaps, 
is rather to be indicated than described. 
The prevailing quality of it is a certain high 
and sweet solemnity — a feeling kindred 



76 WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 

with the placid, happy melancholy that 
steals over the mind, when, on a sombre 
afternoon in autumn, you stand in the 
churchyard, and listen, amid rustling 
branches and sighing grass, to the low 
music of distant organ and chanting choir. 
Peace, haunted by romance, dwells here in 
reverie. The great tower of Warwick, 
based in silver Avon and pictured in its 
slumbering waters, seems musing upon the 
centuries over which it has watched, and 
full of unspeakable knowledge and thought. 
The dark and massive gateways of the town 
and the timber-crossed fronts of its antique 
houses live on in the same strange dream 
and perfect repose ; and all along the drive 
to Kenilworth are equal images of rest — of 
a rest in which there is nothing supine or 
sluggish, no element of death or decay, but 
in which passion, imagination, beauty, and 
sorrow, seized at their topmost poise, seem 
crystallised in eternal calm. What opu- 
lence of splendid life is vital for ever in 
Kenilworth' s crumbling ruin there are no 
words to say. What pomp of royal ban- 
ners ! what dignity of radiant cavaliers ! 
what loveliness of stately and exquisite 
ladies ! what magnificence of banquets ! 
what wealth of pageantry ! what lustre of 



■WARWICK AND KEXILWORTH. 77 

illumination ! The same festal music that 
the old poet Gascoigne heard there, three 
hundred years ago, is still sounding on, to- 
day. The proud and cruel Leicester still 
walks in his vaulted hall. The imperious 
face of the Virgin Queen still from her 
dais looks down on plumed courtiers and 
jewelled dames ; and still the moonlight, 
streaming through the turret- window, falls 
on the white bosom and the great, startled, 
black eyes of Amy Eobsart, waiting for 
her lover. The gaze of the pilgrim, indeed, 
rests only upon old, gray, broken walls, 
overgrown with green moss and ivy, and 
pierced by irregular casements through 
which the sun shines, and the winds blow, 
and the rains drive, and the birds fly, 
amid utter desolation. But silence and 
ruin are here alike eloquent and awful ; 
and, much as the place impresses you by 
what remains, it impresses you far more 
by what has vanished. Ambition, love, 
pleasure, power, misery, tragedy — these 
are gone ; and being gone they are immor- 
tal. I plucked, in the garden of Kenil- 
worth, one of the most brilliant red roses 
that ever grew ; and as I pressed it to my 
lips I seemed to touch the lips of that 
superb, bewildering beauty who outweighed 



78 WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 

England's crown (at least in story), and 
whose spirit is the everlasting genius of the 
place. 

There is a row of cottages opposite to 
the ruins of the castle, in which content- 
ment seems to have made her home. The 
ivy embowers them. The roses cluster 
around their little windows. The green 
sward slopes away, in front, from big, flat 
stones that are embedded in the mossy sod 
before their doors. Down in the valley, 
hard by, your steps stray through an an- 
cient graveyard — in which stands the par- 
ish church, a carefully restored building 
of the 11th century, with tower, and clock, 
and bell — and past a few fragments of the 
Abbey and Monastery of St. Mary, de- 
stroyed in 1538. At many another point, 
on the roads betwixt Warwick and Kenil- 
worth and Stratford, I came upon such 
nests of cosy, rustic quiet and seeming hap- 
piness. They build their country houses 
low, in England, so that the trees over- 
hang them, and the cool, friendly, flower- 
gemmed earth — parent, and stay, and 
bourne of mortal life — is tenderly taken 
into their companionship. Here, at Kenil- 
worth, as elsewhere, at such places as 
Marlowe, Henley, Richmond, Maidenhead, 



WARWICK AND KEXILWORTH. 79 

Cookham, and the region round about 
Windsor, I saw many a sweet nook where 
tired life might be content to lay down its 
burden and enter into its rest. In all true 
love of country — a passion that seems to 
be more deeply felt in England than any- 
where else upon the globe — there is love 
for the literal soil itself : and that sentiment 
in the human heart is equally natural and 
pious which inspires and perpetuates man's 
desire that where he found his cradle he 
may also find his grave. 

Under a cloudy sky and through a land- 
scape still wet and shining with recent 
rain the drive to Stratford was a pleasure 
so exquisite that at last it became a pain. 
Just as the carriage reached the junction of 
the Warwick and Snitterfield roads a ray 
of sunshine, streaming through a rift in 
the clouds, fell upon the neighbouring hill- 
side, scarlet with poppies, and lit the scene 
as with the glory of a celestial benediction. 
This sunburst, neither growing larger nor 
coming nearer, followed all the way to 
Stratford; and there, on a sudden, the 
clouds were lifted and dispersed, and "fair 
daylight " flooded the whole green country- 
side. The afternoon sun was still high in 
heaven when I alighted at the Ked Horse 



8o WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 

and entered the little parlour of Washing- 
ton Irving. They keep the room much as 
it was when he left it ; for they are proud 
of his gentle genius and grateful for his 
commemorative words. In a corner stands 
[1877] the small, old-fashioned hair-cloth 
arm-chair in which he sat, on that night of 
memory and of musing which he has de- 
scribed in The Sketch-Book. A brass plate 
is affixed to it, bearing his name ; and the 
visitor observes, in token of its age and ser- 
vice, that the hair-cloth of its seat is con- 
siderably worn and frayed. Every Ameri- 
can pilgrim to Stratford sits in that chair ; 
and looks with tender interest on the old 
fireplace ; and reads the memorials of Irv- 
ing that are hung upon the walls : and it is 
no small comfort there to reflect that our 
ilkistrious countryman — whose name will 
be remembered with honour, as long as 
literature is prized among men — was the 
first, in modern days, to discover the beau- 
ties and to interpret the poetry of the birth- 
place of Shakespeare. 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 8l 



VIII. 
FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

ONCE again, as it did on that delicious 
summer afternoon which is for ever 
memorable in my life, the golden glory of 
the westering sun burns on the gray spire of 
Stratford church, and on the ancient grave- 
yard below, — wherein the mossy stones 
lean this way and that, in sweet and orderly 
confusion, — and on the peaceful avenue of 
limes, and on the burnished water of silver 
Avon. The tall, pointed, many-coloured 
windows of the church glint in the evening 
light. A cool and fragrant wind is stirring 
the branches and the grass. The small 
birds, calling to their mates or sporting in 
the wanton pleasure of their airy life, are 
circling over the church roof or hiding in 
little crevices of its walls. On the vacant 
meadows across the river stretch away the 
long and level shadows of the pompous 
elms. Here and there, upon the river's 
brink, are pairs of what seem lovers, stroll- 



82 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

ing by the reedy marge, or sitting upon the 
low tombs, in the Sabbath quiet. As the 
sun sinks and the dusk deepens, two figures 
of infirm old women, clad in black, pass 
with slow and feeble steps through the 
avenue of limes, and vanish around an an- 
gle of the church — that now stands all 
in shadow : and no sound is heard but the 
faint rustling of the leaves. 

Once again, as on that sacred night, the 
streets of Stratford are deserted and silent 
under the star-lit sky, and I am standing, 
in the dim darkness, at the door of the 
cottage in which Shakespeare was born. It 
is empty, dark, and still ; and in all the 
neighbourhood there is no stir nor sign of 
life ; but the quaint casements and gables 
of this haunted house, its antique porch, 
and the great timbers that cross its front 
are luminous as with a light of their own, 
so that I see them with perfect vision. I 
stand there a long time, and I know that 
I am to remember these sights for ever, as 
I see them now. After a while, with linger- 
ing reluctance, I turn away from this mar- 
vellous spot, and, presently passing through 
a little, winding lane, I walk in the High 
Street of the town, and mark, at the end of 
the prospect, the illuminated clock in the 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 83 

tower of the chapel of the Holy Cross. A 
few chance-directed steps bring me to what 
was New Place once, where Shakespeare 
died ; and there again I pause, and long 
remain in meditation, gazing into the en- 
closed garden, where, under screens of wire, 
are certain strange fragments of lime and 
stone. These — which I do not then know 
— are the remains of the foundation of 
Shakespeare's house. The night wanes; 
and still I walk in Stratford streets ; and 
"by and by I am standing on the bridge that 
spans the Avon, and looking down at the 
tbick-clustering stars reflected in its black 
and silent stream. At last, under the roof 
of the Red Horse, I sink into a troubled 
slumber, from which soon a strain of celes- 
tial music — strong, sweet, jubilant, and 
splendid — awakens me in an instant ; and I 
start up in my bed — to find that all around 
me is still as death ; and then, drowsily, 
far-off, the bell strikes three, in its weird 
and lonesome tower. 

Every pilgrim to Stratford knows, in a 
general way, what he will there behold. 
Copious and frequent description of its 
Shakespearean associations has made the 
place familiar to all the world. Yet these 
Shakespearean associations keep a peren- 



84 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

nial freshness, and are equally a surprise 
to the sight and a wonder to the soul. 
Though three centuries old they are not 
stricken with age or decay. The house 
in Henley Street, in which, according to 
accepted tradition, Shakespeare was born, 
has been from time to time repaired ; and 
so it has been kept sound, without having 
been materially changed from what it was 
in Shakespeare's youth. The kind ladies, 
Miss Maria and Miss Caroline Chataway, 
who take care of it [1877J, and with so much 
pride and courtesy show it to the visitor, 
called my attention to a bit of the ceiling 
of the upper chamber — the room of Shake- 
speare's birth — which had begun to droop, 
and had been skilfully secured with little 
iron laths. It is in this room that the 
numerous autographs are scrawled over the 
ceiling and walls. One side of the chimney- 
piece here is called "The Actor's Pillar," 
so richly is it adorned with the names of 
actors; Edmund Kean's signature being 
among them, and still legible. On one of 
the window-panes, cut with a diamond, is 
the name of " W. Scott"; and all the 
panes are scratched with signatures — mak- 
ing you think of Douglas Jerrold's remark 
on bad Shakespearean commentators, that 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-OX- AVON. 85 

they resemble persons who write on glass 
with diamonds, and obscure the light with 
a multitude of scratches. The floor of this 
room, uncarpeted and almost snow-white 
with much washing, seems still as hard as 
iron ; yet its boards have been hollowed by 
wear, and the heads of the old nails that 
fasten it down gleam like polished silver. 
You can sit in an antique chair, in a corner 
of this room, if you like, and think unutter- 
able things. There is, certainly, no word 
that can even remotely suggest the feeling 
with which you are there overwhelmed. 
You can sit also in the room below, in the 
seat, in the corner of the wide fireplace, that 
Shakespeare himself must often have occu- 
pied. They keep but a few sticks of furni- 
ture in any part of the cottage. One room 
is devoted to Shakespearean relics — more 
or less authentic ; one of which is a school- 
boy's desk that was obtained from the old 
grammar-school in Church Street in which 
Shakespeare was once a pupil. At the 
back of the cottage, now isolated from con- 
tiguous structures, is a pleasant garden, 
and at one side is a cosy, luxurious little 
cabin — the home of order and of pious 
decorum — for the ladies who are custodi- 
ans of the Shakespeare House. If you are 



86 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

a favoured visitor, you may receive from 
that garden, at parting, all the flowers, 
prettily mounted upon a sheet of paper, 
that poor Ophelia names, in the scene of 
her madness. "There's rosemary, that's 
for remembrance : and there is pansies, 
that's for thoughts : there's fennel for you, 
and columbines : there's rue for you : 
there's a daisy: — I would give you some 
violets, but they withered all when my 
father died." 

The minute knowledge that Shakespeare 
had of plants and flowers, and the loving 
appreciation with which he describes pas- 
toral scenery, are explained to the rambler 
in Stratford by all that he sees and hears. 
There is a walk across the fields to Shottery 
that the poet must often have taken, in 
the days of his courtship of Anne Hatha- 
way. The path to this hamlet passes through 
pastures and gardens, flecked everywhere 
with those brilliant scarlet poppies that 
are so radiant and so bewitching in the 
English landscape. To have grown up 
amid such surroundings, and, above all, 
to have experienced amid them the pas- 
sion of love, must have been, for Shake- 
speare, the intuitive acquirement of ample 
and specific knowledge of their manifold 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-OX-AVON. 87 

beauties. It would be hard to find a 
sweeter rustic retreat than Anne Hatha- 
way' s cottage is, even now. Tall trees 
embower it ; and over its porches, and all 
along its picturesque, irregular front, and 
on its thatched roof, the woodbine and the 
ivy climb, and there are wild roses and the 
maiden's blush. For the young poet's woo- 
ing no place could be fitter than this. He 
would always remember it with tender joy. 
They show you, in that cottage, an old set- 
tle, by the fireside, whereon the lovers may 
have sat together : it formerly stood outside 
the door : and in the rude little chamber 
next the roof an antique, carved bedstead, 
that Anne Hathaway once owned. This, 
it is thought, continued to be Anne's home 
for several years of her married life — her 
husband being absent in London, and some- 
times coming down to visit her, at Shottery. 
"He was wont," says John Aubrey, the 
antiquary, writing in 1680, "to go to his 
native comitry once a year." The last 
surviving descendant of the Hathaway fam- 
ily — Mrs. Baker — lives in the house now, 
and welcomes with homely hospitality the 
wanderers, from all lands, who seek — in 
a sympathy and reverence most honourable 
to human nature — the shrine of Shake- 



88 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

speare's love. There is one such wanderer 
who will never forget the farewell clasp 
of that kind woman's hand, and who has 
never parted with her gift of woodbine and 
roses from the porch of Anne Hathaway' s 
cottage. 

In England it is living, more than writing 
about it, that is esteemed by the best per- 
sons. They prize good writing, but they 
prize noble living far more. This is an 
ingrained principle, and not an artificial 
habit, and this principle doubtless was 
as potent in Shakespeare's age as it is 
to-day. Nothing could be more natural 
than that this great writer should think 
less of his works than of the establishment 
of his home. He would desire, having won 
a fortune, to dwell in his native place, to 
enjoy the companionship and esteem of his 
neighbours, to participate in their pleasures, 
to help them in their troubles, to aid in 
the improvement and embellishment of the 
town, to deepen his hold upon the affections 
of all around him, and to feel that, at last, 
honoured and lamented, his ashes would be 
laid in the village church where he had 
worshipped — 

" Among familiar names to rest, 
And in the places of his youth." 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 89 

It was in 1597, twelve years after he 
went to London, that the poet began to buy 
property in Stratford, and it was about 
eight years after his first purchase that he 
finally settled there, at New Place. [J. 0. 
Halliwell-Phillips says that it was in 1609 : 
There is a record alleging that as late as 
that year Shakespeare still retained a resi- 
dence in Clink Street, South wark.] This 
mansion was altered by Sir Hugh Clopton, 
who owned it toward the middle of the 
eighteenth century, and it was destroyed by 
the Rev. Francis Gastrell, in 1759. The 
grounds, which have been reclaimed, — 
chiefly through the zeal of J. 0. Halliwell- 
Phillips, — are laid out according to the 
model they are supposed to have presented 
when Shakespeare owned them. His lawn, 
his orchard, and his garden are indicated ; 
and a scion of his mulberry is growing on 
the spot where that famous tree once flour- 
ished. You can see a part of the founda- 
tion of the old house. It was made of 
brick and timber, it seems to have had 
gables, and no doubt it was fashioned 
with beautiful curves and broken lines of 
the Tudor architecture. They show, upon 
the lawn, a stone of considerable size, 
that surmounted its door. The site — 



90 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 

still a central and commodious one — 
is on the corner of Chapel Street and 
Chapel Lane ; and on the opposite corner 
stands now, as it has stood for eight hun- 
dred years, the chapel of the Holy Cross, 
with square, dark tower, fretted parapet, 
pointed casements, and Norman porch — 
one of the most romantic and picturesque 
little churches in England. It was easy, 
when musing on that storied spot, to fancy 
Shakespeare, in the gloaming of a summer 
day, strolling on the lawn, beneath his elms, 
and listening to the soft and solemn music 
of the chapel organ ; or to think of him as 
stepping forth from his study, in the late 
and lonesome hours of the night, and paus- 
ing to " count the clock," or note " the ex- 
halations whizzing in the air.'" 

The funeral train of Shakespeare, on that 
dark day when it moved from New Place 
to Stratford Church, had but a little way to 
go. The river, surely, must have seemed to 
hush its murmurs, the trees to droop their 
branches, the sunshine to grow dim — as 
that sad procession passed ! His grave is 
under the gray pavement of the chancel, 
near the altar, and his wife and one of his 
daughters are buried beside him. The pil- 
grim who reads upon the gravestone those 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 91 

rugged lines of grievous entreaty and awful 
imprecation that guard the poet's rest 
feels no doubt that he is listening to his 
living voice — for he has now seen the en- 
chanting beauty of the place, and he has 
now felt what passionate affection it can 
inspire. Feeling and not manner would 
naturally have prompted that abrupt, agon- 
ised supplication and threat. Nor does 
such a pilgrim doubt, when gazing on the 
painted bust, above the grave, — made by 
Gerard Jonson, stonecutter, — that he be- 
holds the authentic face of Shakespeare. 
It is not the heavy face of the portraits that 
represent it. There is a rapt, transfigured 
quality in it, that those copies do not con- 
vey. It is thoughtful, austere, and yet be- 
nign. Shakespeare was a hazel -eyed man, 
with auburn hair, and the colours that he 
wore were scarlet and black. Being painted, 
and also being set up at a considerable 
height on the church wall, the bust does 
not disclose what is sufficiently perceptible 
in a cast from it — that it is the copy of a 
mask from the dead face. One of the cheeks 
is a little swollen and the tongue is slightly 
protruded and is caught between the lips. 
It need not be said that the idle theory that 
the poet was not a gentleman of considera- 



92 FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD ON-AVON. 

tion in his own time and place falls utterly 
and for ever from the mind when you stand 
at his grave. No man could have a more 
honourable or sacred place of sepulture ; and 
while it illustrates the profound esteem of 
the community in which he lived it testifies 
to the high religious character by which that 
esteem was confirmed. "I commend my 
soul into the hands of God, my Creator, 
hoping, and assuredly believing, through 
the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, 
to be made partaker of life everlasting." So 
said Shakespeare, in his last Will, bowing in 
humble reverence the mightiest mind — as 
vast and limitless in the power to compre- 
hend as to express ! — that ever wore the 
garments of mortality. 1 

1 It ought perhaps to be remarked that this prel- 
ude to Shakespeare's Will may not have been in- 
tended by him as a profession of faith, but may have 
been signed simply as a legal formula. His works 
denote a mind of high and broad spiritual convic- 
tions, untrammelled by creed or doctrine. His in- 
clination, probably, was toward the Roman Catholic 
church, because of the poetry that is in it: but such 
a man as Shakespeare would have viewed all relig- 
ious beliefs in a kindly spirit, and would have made 
no emphatic professions. The Will was executed on 
March 25, 1616. It covers three sheets of paper; it 
is not in Shakespeare's hand-writing, but each sheet 
bears his signature. 



FIRST VIEW OF STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 93 

Once again there is a sound of organ 
music, very low and soft, in Stratford 
church, and the dim light, broken by the 
richly stained windows, streams across the 
dusky chancel, filling the still air with opal 
haze and flooding those gray gravestones 
with its mellow radiance. Not a word is 
spoken ; but, at intervals, the rustle of the 
leaves is audible in a sighing wind. What 
visions are these, that suddenly fill the 
region ! What royal faces of monarchs, 
proud with power, or pallid with anguish ! 
What sweet, imperial women, gleeful with 
happy youth and love, or wide-eyed and 
rigid in tearless woe ! What warriors, with 
serpent diadems, defiant of death and hell ! 
The mournful eyes of Hamlet ; the wild 
countenance of Lear ; Ariel with his harp, 
and Prospero with his wand ! Here is no 
death ! All these, and more, are immortal 
shapes ; and he that made them so, al- 
though his mortal part be but a handful 
of dust in yonder crypt, is a glorious angel 
beyond the stars. 



94 LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 



IX. 

LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

THOSE persons upon whom the spirit of 
the past has power — and it has not 
power upon every mind ! — are aware of 
the mysterious charm that invests certain 
familiar spots and objects, in all old cities. 
London, to observers of this class, is a 
never-ending delight. Modern cities, for 
the most part, reveal a definite and rather a 
commonplace design. Their main avenues 
are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect 
their main avenues. They are diversified 
with rectangular squares. Their configura- 
tion, in brief, suggests the sapient, utilita- 
rian forethought of the land-surveyor and 
civil engineer. The ancient British capital, 
on the contrary, is the expression — slowly 
and often narrowly made — of many thou- 
sands of characters. It is a city that has 
happened — and the stroller through the old 
part of it comes continually upon the queer- 
est imaginable alleys, courts, and nooks. 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 95 

Not far from Drury Lane Theatre, for in- 
stance, hidden away in a clump of dingy 
houses, is a dismal little graveyard — the 
same that Dickens has chosen, in his novel 
of Bleak House, as the sepulchre of little 
Jo's friend, the first love of the unfortunate 
Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped 
in the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded 
into the twilight of obscurity by the thick- 
clustering habitations of men. 1 The Crip- 
plegate church, St. Giles's, a less lugubrious 
spot and less difficult of access, is never- 
theless strangely sequestered, so that it 
also affects the observant eye as equally 
one of the surprises of London. I saw it, 
for the first time, on a gray, sad Sunday, a 
little before twilight, and when the service 
was going on within its venerable walls. 
The footsteps of John Milton were some- 
times on the threshold of the Cripplegate, 
and his grave is in the nave of that ancient 
church. A simple flat stone marks that 
sacred spot, and many a heedless foot 
tramples over that hallowed dust. From 
Golden Lane, which is close by, you can see 
the tower of this church ; and, as you walk 
from the place where Milton lived to the 

1 This place has been renovated and is no longer 
a disgrace. 



96 LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

place where his ashes repose, you seem, 
with a solemn, awe-stricken emotion, to be 
actually following in his funeral train. At 
St. Giles's occurred the marriage of Crom- 
well. * I remembered — as I stood there and 
conjured up that scene of golden joy and 
hope — the place of the Lord Protector's 
coronation in Westminster Hall ; the place, 
still marked, in Westminster Abbey, where 
his body was buried ; and old Temple Bar, 
on which (if not on Westminster Hall) his 
mutilated corse was finally exposed to the 
blind rage of the fickle populace. A little 
time — a very little time — serves to gather 
up equally the happiness and the anguish, 
the conquest and the defeat, the greatness 
and the littleness of human life, and to 
cover them all with silence. 

But not always with oblivion. These 
quaint churches, and many other moulder- 
ing relics of the past, in London, are haunted 
with associations that never can perish out 
of remembrance. In fact the whole of the 
old city impresses you as densely invested 

i The. church of St. Giles was built in 1117 by 
Queen Maud. It was demolished in 1623 and rebuilt 
in 1731. The tomb of Richard Pendrell, who saved 
Charles the Second, after Worcester fight, iu 1651, 
is in the churchyard. 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 97 

with an atmosphere of human experience, 
dark, sad, and lamentable. Walking, alone, 
in ancient quarters of it, after midnight, I 
was aware of the oppressive sense of trag- 
edies that have been acted and misery 
that has been endured in its dusky streets 
and melancholy houses. They do not err 
who say that the spiritual life of man leaves 
its influence in the physical objects by 
which he is surrounded. Night-walks in 
London will teach you that, if they teach 
you nothing else. I went more than once 
into Brooke Street, Holborn, and traced 
the desolate footsteps of poor Thomas Chat- 
terton to the scene of his self-murder and 
agonised, pathetic, deplorable death. It is 
more than a century (1770), since that 
"marvellous boy" was driven to suicide 
by neglect, hunger, and despair. They 
are tearing down the houses on one side 
of Brooke Street now (1877); it is doubt- 
ful which house was No. 4, in the attic 
of which Chatterton died, and doubtful 
whether it remains : his grave — a pauper's 
grave, that was made in a workhouse 
burial-ground, in Shoe Lane, long since 
obliterated — is unknown ; but his presence 
hovers about that region ; his strange and 
touching story tinges its commonness with 

G 



9» LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

the mystical moonlight of romance ; and 
his name is blended with it for ever. On 
another night I walked from St. James's 
Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of 
Cardinal Wolsey), and viewed the ground 
that Charles the First must have traversed, 
on his way to the scaffold. The story of 
the slaughter of that king, always sorrow- 
ful to remember, is very grievous to con- 
sider, when you realise, upon the actual 
scene of his ordeal and death, his exalted 
fortitude and his bitter agony. It seemed 
as if I could almost hear his voice, as it 
sounded on that fateful morning, asking 
that his body might be more warmly clad, 
lest, in the cold January air, he should 
shiver, and so, before the eyes of his ene- 
mies, should seem to be trembling with 
fear. The Puritans, having brought that 
poor man to the place of execution, kept 
him in suspense from early morning till 
after two o'clock in the day, while they de- 
bated over a proposition to spare his life — 
upon any condition they might choose to 
make — that had been sent to them by 
his son, Prince Charles. Old persons were 
alive in London, not very long ago, who re- 
membered having seen, in their childhood, 
the window, in the end of Whitehall 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 99 

Banqueting House — now a Chapel Royal 
and all that remains of the ancient palace — 
through which the doomed monarch walked 
forth to the block. It was long ago walled 
up, and the palace has undergone much 
alteration since the days of the Stuarts. 
In the rear of Whitehall stands a bronze 
statue of James the Second by Roubiliac 
(whose marbles are numerous, in the Abbey 
and elsewhere in London, and whose grave 
is in the church of St. Martin), one of the 
most graceful works of that spirited sculp- 
tor. The figure is finely modelled. The 
face is dejected and full of reproach. The 
right hand points, with a truncheon, toward 
the earth. It is impossible to mistake the 
ruminant, melancholy meaning of this me- 
morial ; and equally it is impossible to 
walk without both thought that instructs 
and emotion that elevates through a city 
which thus abounds with traces of momen- 
tous incident and representative experience. 
The literary pilgrim in London has this 
double advantage — that while he communes 
with the past he may enjoy in the present. 
Yesterday and to-day are commingled here, 
in a way that is almost ludicrous. When 
you turn from Roubiliac' s statue of James 
your eyes rest upon the retired house of Dis- 



IOO LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

raeli. If you walk in Whitehall, toward 
the Palace of Westminster, some friend 
may chance to tell you how the great Duke 
of Wellington walked there, in the feeble- 
ness of his age, from the Horse Guards to 
the House of Lords ; and with what pleased 
complacency the old warrior used to boast 
of his skill in threading a crowded thorough- 
fare, — unaware that the police, acting by 
particular orders, protected his reverend 
person from errant cabs and pushing pedes- 
trians. As I strolled one day past Lam- 
beth Palace it happened that the palace 
gates were suddenly unclosed and that His 
Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury came 
forth, on horseback, from that episcopal 
residence, and ambled away toward the 
House of Lords. It is the same arched 
portal through which, in other days, passed 
out the stately train of Wolsey. It is the 
same towered palace that Queen Elizabeth 
looked upon as her barge swept past, on 
its watery track to Richmond. It is for 
ever associated with the memory of Thomas 
Cromwell. In the church, hard by, rest the 
ashes of men distinguished in the most 
diverse directions — Jackson, the clown ; 
and Tenison, the archbishop, the "honest, 
prudent, laborious, and benevolent" pri- 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. IOI 

mate of William the Third, who was thought 
worthy to succeed in office the illustrious 
Tillotson. The cure of souls is sought here 
with just as vigorous energy as when Tillot- 
son wooed by his goodness and charmed by 
his winning eloquence. Not a great distance 
from this spot you come upon the college 
at Dulwich that Edward Alleyn founded, 
in the time of Shakespeare, and that still 
subsists upon the old actor's endowment. 
It is said that Alleyn — who was a man of 
fortune, and whom a contemporary epigram 
styles the best actor of his day — gained 
the most of his money by the exhibition of 
bears. But, howsoever gained, he made 
a good use of it. His tomb is in the centre 
of the college. Here may be seen one of the 
best picture-galleries in England. One of 
the cherished paintings in that collection is 
the famous portrait, by Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds, of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse 
— remarkable for its colour, and splendidly 
expositive of the boldness of feature, bril- 
liancy of countenance, and stately grace of 
posture for which its original was distin- 
guished. Another represents two renowned 
beauties of their day — the Linley sisters — 
who became Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. 
You do not wonder, as you look on those 



102 LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 

fair faces, sparkling with health, arch with 
merriment, lambent with sensibility, and 
soft with goodness and feeling, that Sheridan 
should have fought duels for such a prize 
as the lady of his love ; or that those fasci- 
nating creatures, favoured alike by the 
Graces and the Muse, should in their gen- 
tle lives have been, " like Juno's swans, 
coupled and inseparable." Mary, Mrs. 
Tickel, died first ; and Moore, in his Life 
of Sheridan, has preserved a lament for 
her, written by Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which 
— for deep, true sorrow and melodious 
eloquence — is worthy to be named with 
Thomas Tickel' s monody on Addison or 
Cowper's memorial lines on his mother's 
picture : — 

"Shall all the wisdom of the world combined 
Erase thy image, Mary, from my mind, 
Or bid me hope from others to receive 
The fond affection thou alone couldst give ? 
Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be 
My friend, my sister, all the world to me ! " 

Precious also among the gems of the 
Dulwich gallery are certain excellent speci- 
mens of the gentle, dreamy style of Murillo. 
The pilgrim passes on, by a short drive, to 
Sydenham, and dines at the Crystal Palace 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. I03 

— and still lie finds the faces of the past and 
the present confronted, in a manner that is 
almost comic. Nothing could be more aptly 
representative of the practical, ostentatious 
phase of the spirit of to-day than is this 
enormous, opulent, and glittering "palace 
made of windows." Yet I saw there the 
carriage in which Napoleon Buonaparte 
used to drive, at St. Helena — a vehicle as 
sombre and ghastly as were the broken for- 
tunes of its death- stricken master ; and, 
sitting at a table close by, I saw the son 
of Buonaparte's fiery champion, William 
Hazlitt. 

It was a gray and misty evening. The 
plains below the palace terraces were veiled 
in shadow, through which, here and there, 
twinkled the lights of some peaceful villa. 
Far away the spires and domes of London, 
dimly seen x pierced the city's nightly pall 
of smoke. It was a dream too sweet to 
last. It ended when all the illuminations 
were burnt out ; when the myriads of red 
and green and yellow stars had fallen ; and 
all the silver fountains had ceased to play. 



104 RELICS OF LOUD BYRON. 



RELICS OF LORD BYRON. 

THE Byron Memorial Loan Collection, 
that was displayed at the Albert 
Memorial Hall, for a short time in the sum- 
mer of 1877, did not attract much atten- 
tion : yet it was a vastly impressive show 
of relics. The catalogue names seventy- 
four objects, together with thirty-nine de- 
signs for a monument to Byron. The de- 
sign that has been chosen presents a seated 
figure, of the young sailor-boy type. The 
right hand supports the chin ; the left, rest- 
ing on the left knee, holds an open book and 
a pencil. The dress consists of a loose 
shirt, open at the throat and on the bosom, 
a flowing neckcloth, and wide, marine trou- 
sers. Byron's dog, Boatswain — commem- 
orated in the well-known misanthropic 
epitaph — ■ 

" To mark a friend's remains these stones arise, 
I never knew but one, and here he lies " — 

is shown, in effigy, at the poet's feet. The 



RELICS. OF LORD BYROX. IO5 

treatment of the subject, in this model, 
certainly deserves to be called free, but the 
general effect of the work is finical. The 
statue will probably be popular ; but it 
will give no adequate idea of the man. 
Byron was both massive and intense ; and 
this image is no more than the usual hero 
of nautical romance. (It was dedicated, 
in London, in May, 1880, and stands in 
Hamilton Gardens, near Hyde Park Cor- 
ner.) 

It was the treasure of relics, however, 
and not the statuary, that more attracted 
notice. The relics were exhibited in three 
glass cases, exclusive of large portraits. It 
is impossible to make the reader — suppos- 
ing him to revere this great poet's genius 
and to care for his memory — feel the thrill 
of emotion that was aroused by actual 
sight, and almost actual touch, of objects 
so intimately associated with the living- 
Byron. Five pieces of his hair were shown, 
one of which was cut off, after his death, by 
Captain Trelawny — the remarkable gentle- 
man who says that he uncovered the legs of 
the corse, in order to ascertain the nature 
and extent of their deformity. All these 
locks of hair are faded and all present a 
mixture of gray and auburn. Byron's hair 



106 RELICS OF LORD BYRON. 

was not, seemingly, of a fine textnre, 
and it turned gray early in life. These 
tresses were lent to the exhibition by 
Lady Dorchester, John Murray, H. M. 
Robinson, D.D., and E. J. Trelawny. A 
strangely interesting memorial was a little 
locket of plain gold, shaped like a heart, 
that Byron habitually wore. Near to this 
was the crucifix found in his bed at Misso- 
longhi, after his death. It is about ten 
inches long and is made of ebony. A small 
bronze figure of Christ is displayed upon it, 
and at the feet of this figure are cross-bones 
and a skull, of the same metal. A glass 
beaker, that Byron gave to his butler, in 
1815, attracted attention by its portly size 
and, to the profane fancy, hinted that his 
lordship had formed a liberal estimate of 
that butler's powers of suction. Four articles 
of head-gear occupied a prominent place in 
one of the cabinets. Two are helmets that 
Byron wore when he was in Greece, in 1824 
— and very queer must have been his ap- 
pearance when he wore them. One is light 
blue, the other dark green ; both are faded ; 
both are fierce with brass ornaments and 
barbaric with brass scales like those of a 
snake. A comelier object is the poet's 
"boarding-cap" — a leather slouch, turned 



RELICS OF LORD BYRON. I07 

up with green velvet and studded with 
brass nails. Many small articles of Byron's 
property were scattered through the cases. 
A corpulent little silver watch, with Arabic 
numerals upon its face, and a meerschaum 
pipe, not much coloured, were among them. 
The cap that he sometimes wore, during 
the last years of his life, — the one depicted 
in a well-known sketch of him by Count 
D'Orsay, — was exhibited, and so was D'Or- 
say's portrait. The cap is of green velvet, 
not much tarnished, and is encircled by 
a gold band and faced by an ugly visor. 
The face in the sketch is supercilious and 
cruel. A better, and obviously truer sketch 
is that made by Cattermole, which also was 
in this exhibition. Strength in despair and 
a dauntless spirit that shines through the 
ravages of irremediable suffering are the 
qualities of this portrait ; and they make it 
marvellously effective. Thorwaldsen's fine 
bust of Byron, made for Hobhouse, and 
also the celebrated Phillips portrait — that 
Scott said was the best likeness of Byron 
ever painted — occupied places in this group. 
The copy of the New Testament that Lady 
Byron gave to her husband, and that he, in 
turn, presented to Lady Caroline Lamb, was 
there, and is a pocket volume, bound in 



108 RELICS OF LORD BYRON. 

black leather, with the inscription, "From 
a sincere and anxious friend," written in a 
stiff, formal hand, across the fly -leaf. A gold 
ring that the poet constantly wore, and the 
collar of his dog Boatswain — a discoloured 
band of brass, with sharply jagged edges — 
should also be named as among the most 
interesting of the relics. 

But the most remarkable objects of all 
were the manuscripts. These comprise the 
original draft of the third canto of ' ' Childe 
Harold, 1 ' written on odd bits of paper, 
during Byron's journey from London to 
Venice, in 1816 ; the first draft of the 
fourth canto, together with a clean copy of 
it; the notes to "Marino Faliero ; " the 
concluding stage directions — much scrawled 
and blotted — in " Heaven and Earth ; " a 
document concerning the poet's matrimo- 
nial trouble ; and about fifteen of his let- 
ters. The passages seen are those beginning 
" Since my young days of passion, joy, or 
pain ; " "To bear unhurt what time cannot 
abate;" and in canto fourth the stanzas 
118 to 129 inclusive. The writing is free 
and strong, and it still remains legible 
although the paper is yellow with age. 
Altogether the^e relics were touchingly sig- 
nificant of the strange, dark, sad career of 



RELICS OF LOUD BYRON. IO9 

a wonderful man. Yet, as already said, 
they attracted but little notice. The mem- 
ory of Byron seems darkened, as with the 
taint of lunacy. " He did strange things," 
one Englishman said to me ; ' ' and there 
was something queer about him." The 
London house in which he was born, in 
Holies Street, Cavendish Square, is marked 
with a tablet, — according to a custom insti- 
tuted by a society of arts. (It was torn 
down in 1890 and its site is now occupied 
by a shop, bearing the name of John Lewis 
& Co.) Two houses in which he lived, No. 
8 St. James Street, near the old palace, and 
Xo. 139 Piccadilly are not marked. The 
house of his birth was occupied in 1877 
by a descendant of Elizabeth Fry, the 
philanthropist. 

The custom of marking the houses associ- 
ated with great names is obviously a good 
one, and it ought to be adopted in other 
countries. Two buildings, one in West- 
minster and one in the grounds of the South 
Kensington Museum, bear the name of 
Franklin ; and I also saw memorial tablets 
to Dryden and Burke in Gerrard Street, to 
Dryden in Fetter Lane, to Mrs. Siddons in 
Baker Street, to Sir Joshua Keynolds and 
to Hogarth in Leicester Square, to Garrick 



IIO RELICS OF LORD BYRON. 

in the Adelphi Terrace, to Louis Napoleon, 
and to many other renowned individuals. 
The room that Sir Joshua occupied as a 
studio is now an auction mart. The stone 
stairs leading up to it are much worn, but 
remain as they were when, it may be imag- 
ined, Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, Langton, 
Beauclerk, and Boswell walked there, on 
many a festive night in the old times. 

It is a breezy, slate-coloured evening in 
July. I look from the window of a London 
house that fronts a spacious park. Those 
great elms, which in their wealth of foliage 
and irregular and pompous expanse of limb 
are finer than all other trees of their class, 
fill the prospect, and nod and murmur in 
the wind. Through a rift in their heavy- 
laden boughs is visible a long vista of green 
field, in which many children are at play. 
Their laughter and the rustle of leaves, 
with now and then the click of a horse's 
hoof upon the road near by, make up the 
music of this hallowed hour. The sky is a 
little overcast but not gloomy. As I muse 
upon this delicious scene the darkness 
slowly gathers, the stars come out, and 
presently the moon rises, and blanches the 
meadow with silver light. Such has been 
the English summer, with scarce a hint of 
either heat or storm. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



XI. 

WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



IT is strange that the life of the past, 
in its unfamiliar remains and fading 
traces, should so far surpass the life of the 
present, in impressive force and influence. 
Human characteristics, although manifested 
under widely different conditions, were the 
same in old times that they are now. It is 
not in them, surely, that we are to seek for 
the mysterious charm that hallows ancient 
objects and the historical antiquities of the 
world. There is many a venerable, weather- 
stained church in London, at sight of which 
your steps falter and your thoughts take a 
wistful, melancholy turn — though then you 
may not know either who built it, or who 
has worshipped in it, or what dust of the 
dead 3 mouldering in its vaults. The spirit 
which thus instantly possesses and' controls 
you is not one of association, but is inherent 
in the place. Time's shadow on the works 
of man, like moonlight on a landscape, gives 



112 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

only graces to the view — tingeing them, the 
while, with sombre sheen — and leaves all 
blemishes in darkness. This may suggest 
the reason that relics of bygone years so 
sadly please and strangely awe us, in the 
passing moment ; or it may be that we in- 
voluntarily contrast their apparent perman- 
ence with our own evanescent mortality, 
and so are dejected with a sentiment of 
dazed helplessness and solemn grief. This 
sentiment it is — allied to bereaved love and 
a natural wish for remembrance after death 
— that has filled Westminster Abbey, and 
many another holy mausoleum, with sculp- 
tured memorials of the departed ; and this, 
perhaps, is the subtle power that makes us 
linger beside them, " with thoughts beyond 
the reaches of our souls. ' ' 

When the gentle angler Izaak Walton 
went into Westminster Abbey to visit the 
grave of Casaubon, he scratched his initials 
on the scholar's monument, where the record, 
"I. W., 1658," may still be read by the 
stroller in Poets' Corner. One might well 
wish to follow that example, and even thus 
to associate his name with the great cathe- 
dral. And not in pride but in humble 
reverence ! Here if anywhere on earth self- 
assertion is rebuked and human eminence 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. II3 

set at nought. Among all the impressions 
that crowd upon the mind in this wonder- 
ful place that which oftenest recurs and 
longest remains is the impression of man's 
individual insignificance. This is salutary, 
but it is also dark. There can be no enjoy- 
ment of the Abbey till, after much com- 
munion with the spirit of the place, your 
soul is soothed by its beauty rather than 
overwhelmed by its majesty, and your mind 
ceases from the vain effort to grasp and in- 
terpret its tremendous meaning. You can- 
not long endure, and you never can express, 
the sense of grandeur that is inspired by 
Westminster Abbey ; but, when at length 
its shrines and tombs and statues become 
familiar, when its chapels, aisles, arches and 
cloisters are grown companionable, and you 
can stroll and dream undismayed "through 
rows of warriors and through walks of 
kings," there is no limit to the pensive 
memories they awaken and the poetic 
fancies they prompt. In this church are 
buried, among generations of their nobles 
and courtiers, fourteen monarchs of England 
— beginning with the Saxon Sebert and 
ending with George the Second. Fourteen 
queens rest here, and many children of the 
royal blood who never came to the throne. 

H 



114 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Here, confronted in a haughty rivalry of 
solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of 
Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen 
Eleanor's dust is here, and here, too, is the 
dust of the grim Queen Mary. In one little 
chapel you may pace, with but half a dozen 
steps, across the graves of Charles the 
Second, William and Mary, and Queen 
Anne and her consort Prince George. At 
the tomb of Henry the Eifth you may see 
the helmet, shield, and saddle that were 
worn by the valiant young king at Agin- 
court ; and close by — on the tomb of Mar- 
garet Woodeville, daughter of Edward the 
Eourth — the sword and shield that were 
borne, in royal state, before the great Edward 
the Third, five hundred years ago. The 
princes who are said to have been murdered 
in the Tower are commemorated here by an 
altar, set up by Charles the Second, whereon 
the inscription — blandly and almost humor- 
ously oblivious of the incident of Cromwell 
— states that it was erected in the thirtieth 
year of Charles's reign. Kichard the Second, 
deposed and assassinated, is here entombed ; 
and within a few feet of him are the relics 
of his uncle, the able and powerful Duke 
of Gloucester, treacherously ensnared and 
betrayed to death. Here also, huge, rough, 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. II5 

and gray, is the stone sarcophagus of Edward 
the First, which, when opened, in 1771, dis- 
closed the skeleton of departed majesty, still 
perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and 
crimson velvet, and having a crown on the 
head and a sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in 
jewelled darkness and gaudy decay, what 
once were monarchs ! And all around are 
great lords, sainted prelates, famous states- 
men, renowned soldiers, and illustrious 
poets. Burleigh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Canning, 
Newton, Barrow, Wilberforce — names for- 
ever glorious ! — are here enshrined in the 
grandest sepulchre on earth. 

The interments that have been effected in 
and around the Abbey since the remote 
age of Edward the Confessor must number 
thousands; but only about six hundred are 
named in the guide-books. In the south 
transept, which is Poets' Corner, rest 
Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, Dry- 
den, Beaumont, Davenant, Prior, Gay, 
Congreve, Rowe, Dr. Johnson, Campbell, 
Macaulay, and Dickens. Memorials to 
many other poets and writers have been 
ranged on the adjacent walls and pillars; 
but these are among the authors that were 
actually buried in this place. Ben Jonson 
is not here, but — in an upright posture, it 



Il6 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

is said — under the north aisle of the Ab- 
bey ; Addison is in the chapel of Henry the 
Seventh, at the foot of the monument of 
Charles Montague, the great Earl of Hali- 
fax ; and Bulwer is in the chapel of Saint 
Edmund. Garrick, Sheridan, Henderson, 
Cumberland, Handel, Parr, Sir Archibald 
Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of 
Argyle are almost side by side ; while in 
St. Edward's chapel sleep Anne of Cleves, 
the divorced wife of Henry the Eighth, and 
Anne Neville, Queen of Richard the Third. 
Betterton and Spranger Barry are in the 
cloisters — where may be read in four little 
words the most touching epitaph in the 
Abbey : ' ' Jane Lister — dear child." There 
are no monuments to either Byron, Shelley, 
Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cowper, 
Moore, or Young; but Mason and Shad- 
well are commemorated ; and Barton Booth 
is splendidly inurned ; while hard by, in 
the cloisters, a place was found for Mrs. 
Cibber, Tom Brown, Anne Bracegirdle, 
Anne Oldfield, and Aphra Behn. The des- 
tinies have not always been stringently 
fastidious as to the admission of lodgers to 
this sacred ground. The pilgrim is startled 
by some of the names that he finds in 
Westminster Abbey, and pained by reflec- 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 1 1 7 

tion on the absence of some that he will 
seek in vain. Yet he will not fail to moral- 
ise, as he strolls in Poets 1 Corner, upon the 
inexorable justice with which time repudi- 
ates fictitious reputations and twines the 
laurel on only the worthiest brows. In 
well-nigh five hundred years of English 
literature there have lived only about a 
hundred and ten poets whose names sur- 
vive in any needed chronicle ; and not all 
of these possess life outside of the library. 
To muse over the literary memorials in the 
Abbey is also to think upon the seeming 
caprice of chance with which the graves of 
the British poets have been scattered far 
and wide throughout the land. Gower, 
Fletcher, and Massinger (to name but a 
few of them) rest in Southwark ; Sydney 
and Donne in St. Paul's cathedral ; More 
(his head, that is, while his body moulders 
in the Tower chapel) at Canterbury ; 
Drummond in Lasswade church ; Dorset 
at Withyham, in Sussex ; Waller at Bea- 
consfield ; Wither, unmarked, in the church 
of the Savoy ; Milton in the church of the 
Cripplegate ; Swift at Dublin, in St. Pa- 
trick's cathedral ; Young at Welwyn ; 
Pope at Twickenham ; Thomson at Rich- 
mond ; Gray at Stoke-Pogis ; Watts in 



Il8 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

Bunhill- Fields ; Collins in an obscure little 
church at Chichester ; Cowper in Dereham 
church ; Goldsmith in the garden of the 
Temple ; Savage at Bristol ; Burns at Dum- 
fries ; Rogers at Hornsey ; Crabbe at Trow- 
bridge ; Scott in Dryburgh abbey ; Cole- 
ridge at Highgate ; Byron in Hucknall 
church, near Nottingham ; Moore at Brom- 
ham ; Montgomery at Sheffield ; Heber at 
Calcutta ; Southey in Crossthwaite church- 
yard, near Keswick ; Wordsworth and 
Hartley Coleridge side by side in the 
churchyard of Grasmere ; and Clough at 
Florence — whose lovely words may here 
speak for all of them — 

" One port, methought, alike they sought, 
One purpose held, where'er they fare: 
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas, 
At last, at last, unite them there! " 

But it is not alone in the great Abbey 
that the rambler in London is impressed by 
poetic antiquity and touching historic asso- 
ciation — always presuming that he has 
been a reader of English literature and that 
his reading has sunk into his mind. Little 
things, equally with great ones, commingled 
in a medley, luxuriant and delicious, so 
people the memory of such a pilgrim that 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. II9 

all his walks will be haunted. The London 
of to-day, to be sure (as may be seen in 
Macaulay's famous third chapter, and in 
Scott's Fortunes of Nigel), is very little 
like even the London of Charles the Sec- 
ond, when the great fire had destroyed 
eighty-nine churches and thirteen thousand 
houses, and when what is now Regent 
Street was a rural solitude in which sports- 
men sometimes shot the woodcock. Yet, 
though much of the old capital has vanished 
and more of it has been changed, many 
remnants of its historic past exist, and 
many of its streets and houses are fraught 
with a delightful, romantic interest. It is 
not forgotten that sometimes the charm 
resides in the eyes that see, quite as much 
as in the object that is seen. The storied 
spots of London may not be appreciable by 
all who look upon them every day. The 
cab-drivers in the region of Kensington 
Palace Road may neither regard, nor even 
notice, the house in which Thackeray lived 
and died. The shop-keepers of old Bond 
Street may, perhaps, neither care nor know 
that in this famous avenue was enacted the 
woful death-scene of Laurence Sterne. The 
Bow Street runners are quite unlikely to 
think of Will's Coffee House, and Dryden, 



120 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 

or Button's, and Addison, as they pass the 
sites of those vanished haunts of wit and 
revelry in the days of Queen Anne. The 
fashionable lounger through Berkeley 
Square, when perchance he pauses at the 
corner of Bruton Street, will not discern 
Colley Cibber, in wig and ruffles, standing 
at the parlour window and drumming with 
his hands on the frame. The casual pas- 
senger, halting at the Tavistock, will not 
remember that this was once Macklin's 
Ordinary, and so conjure up the iron visage 
and ferocious aspect of the first great Shy- 
lock of the British stage, formally obsequi- 
ous to his guests, or striving to edify them, 
despite the banter of the volatile Foote, 
with discourse upon ' ' the Causes of Duel- 
ling in Ireland." The Barbican does not 
to every one summon the austere memory 
of Milton ; nor Holborn raise the melan- 
choly shade of Chatterton ; nor Tower Hill 
arouse the gloomy ghost of Otway ; nor 
Hampstead lure forth the sunny figure of 
Steele and the passionate face of Keats ; 
nor old Northampton Street suggest the 
burly presence of ' ' rare Ben Jonson ' ' ; 
nor opulent Kensington revive the stately 
head of Addison ; nor a certain window in 
Wellington Street reveal in fancy's picture 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 121 

the rugged lineaments and splendid eyes of 
Dickens. Yet London never disappoints ; 
and for him who knows and feels its his- 
tory these associations, and hundreds like 
to these, make it populous with noble or 
strange or pathetic figures, and diversify 
the aspect of its vital present with pictures 
of an equally vital past. Such a wanderer 
discovers that in this vast capital there is 
literally no end to the themes that are to 
stir his imagination, touch his heart, and 
broaden his mind. Soothed already by the 
equable English climate and the lovely 
English scenery, he is aware now of an 
influence in the solid English city that 
turns his intellectual life to perfect tranquil- 
lity. He stands amid achievements that are 
finished, careers that are consummated, 
great deeds that are done, great memories 
that are immortal ; he views and compre- 
hends the sum of all that is possible to 
human thought, passion, and labour ; and 
then, — high over mighty London, above the 
dome of St. Paul's cathedral, piercing the 
clouds, greeting the sun, drawing into it- 
self all the tremendous life of the great city 
and all the meaning of its past and present, 
— the golden cross of Christ ! 



122 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 



XII. 

Shakespeare's home. 

IT is the everlasting glory of Stratford- 
upon-Avon that it was the birthplace 
of Shakespeare. Situated in the heart of 
Warwickshire, which has been called "the 
garden of England," it nestles cosily in an 
atmosphere of tranquil loveliness and is 
surrounded with everything that soft and 
gentle rural scenery can provide to soothe 
the mind and to nurture contentment. 
It stands upon a plain, almost in the 
centre of the island, through which, be- 
tween the low green hills that roll away on 
either side, the Avon flows downward to 
the Severn. The country in its neighbour- 
hood is under perfect cultivation, and for 
many miles around presents the appearance 
of a superbly appointed park. Portions of 
the land are devoted to crops and pasture ; 
other portions are thickly wooded with oak, 
elm, willow, and chestnut ; the meadows 
are intersected by hedges of fragrant haw- 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 23 

thorn, and the region smiles with flowers." 
Old manor-houses, half-hidden among the 
trees, and thatched cottages embowered 
with roses are sprinkled through the sur- 
rounding landscape ; and all the roads that 
converge upon this point — from Birming- 
ham, Warwick, Shipton, Bidford, Alcester, 
Evesham, Worcester, and other contiguous 
towns — wind, in sun and shadow, through 
a sod of green velvet, swept by the cool, 
sweet winds of the English summer. Such 
felicities of situation and such accessories 
of beauty, however, are not unusual in 
England ; and Stratford, were it not hal- 
lowed by association, though it would always 
hold a place among the pleasant memories 
of the traveller, would not have become a 
shrine for the homage of the world. To 
Shakespeare it owes its renown ; from 
Shakespeare it derives the bulk of its pros- 
perity. To visit Stratford is to tread with 
affectionate veneration in the footsteps of 
the poet. To write about Stratford is to 
write about Shakespeare. 

More than three hundred years have 
passed since the birth of that colossal 
genius and many changes have occurred 
in his native town within that period. The 
Stratford of Shakespeare's time was built 



124 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

•principally of timber, and it contained about 
fourteen hundred inhabitants. To-day its 
population numbers more than eight thou- 
sand. New dwellings have arisen where 
once were fields of wheat, glorious with 
the shimmering lustre of the scarlet poppy. 
Many of the older buildings have been 
altered. Manufacture has been stimulated 
into prosperous activity. The Avon has 
been spanned by a new bridge, of iron — a 
path for pedestrians, adjacent to Clopton's 
bridge of stone. (The iron bridge was 
opened November 23, 1827. The Clopton 
Bridge was 376 yards long and about 16 
yards wide. Alterations of the west end 
of it were made in 1814.) The streets have 
been levelled, swept, rolled and garnished 
till they look like a Flemish drawing of the 
Middle Ages. Even the Shakespeare cot- 
tage, the old Harvard house in High Street, 
and the two old churches — authentic and 
splendid memorials of a distant and storied 
past — have been "restored." If the poet 
could walk again through his accustomed 
haunts, though he would see the same smil- 
ing country round about, and hear, as of 
old, the ripple of the Avon murmuring in 
its summer sleep, his eyes would rest on 
but few objects that once he knew. Yet, 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 25 

there are the paths that Shakespeare often 
trod ; there stands the house in which he 
was born ; there is the school in which he 
was taught ; there is the cottage in which 
he wooed his sweetheart ; there are the 
traces and relics of the mansion in which 
he died ; and there is the church that keeps 
his dust, so consecrated by the reverence of 
mankind 

" That kings for such a tomb would wish to 
die." 

In shape the town of Stratford somewhat 
resembles a large cross, which is formed by 
High Street, running nearly north and south, 
and Bridge Street and Wood Street, running 
nearly east and west. From these, which 
are main avenues, radiate many and devious 
branches. A few of the streets are broad 
and straight but many of them are narrow 
and crooked. High and Bridge Streets 
intersect each other at the centre of the 
town, and there stands the market house, 
an ugly building, of the period of George 
the Fourth, with belfry and illuminated 
clock, facing eastward toward the old stone 
bridge, with fourteen arches, — the bridge 
that Sir Hugh Clopton built across the 
Avon, in the reign of Henry the Seventh. 



126 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

A cross once stood at the corner of High 
Street and Wood Street, and near the cross 
was a pump and a well. From that central 
point a few steps will bring the traveller to 
the birthplace of Shakespeare. It is a little, 
two-story cottage of timber and plaster, on 
the north side of Henley Street, in the 
western part of the town. It must have 
been, in its pristine days, finer than most 
of the dwellings in its neighbourhood. The 
one-story house, with attic windows, was 
the almost invariable fashion of building, 
in English country towns, till the seven- 
teenth century. This cottage, besides its 
two stories, had dormer-windows, a pent- 
house over its door, and altogether was 
built and appointed in a manner both luxu- 
rious and substantial. Its age is unknown ; 
but the history of Stratford reaches back 
to a period three hundred years antecedent 
to William the Conqueror, and fancy, there- 
fore, is allowed ample room to magnify its 
antiquity. It was bought, or occupied, by 
Shakespeare's father in 1555, and in it he 
resided till his death, in 1601, when it de- 
scended by inheritance to the poet. Such 
is the substance of the complex documen- 
tary evidence and of the emphatic tradition 
that consecrate this cottage as the house in 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 27 

which Shakespeare was born. The point 
has never been absolutely settled. John 
Shakespeare, the father, was the owner in 
1564 not only of the house in Henley Street 
but of another in Greenhill Street. Wil- 
liam Shakespeare might have been born 
at either of those dwellings. Tradition, 
however, has sanctified the Henley Street 
cottage ; and this, accordingly, as Shake- 
speare's cradle, will be piously guarded to 
a late posterity. 

It has already survived serious perils and 
vicissitudes. By Shakespeare's will it was 
bequeathed to his sister Joan — Mrs. William 
Hart — to be held by her, under the yearly 
rent of twelvepence, during her life, and at 
her death to revert to his daughter Susanna 
and her descendants. His sister Joan ap- 
pears to have been living there at the time 
of his decease, in 1616. She is known to 
have been living there in 1639 — twenty-three 
years later, — and doubtless she resided 
there till her death, in 1646. The estate 
then passed to Susanna — Mrs. John Hall, 
— from whom in 1649 it descended to her 
grandchild, Lady Barnard, who left it to 
her kinsmen, Thomas and George Hart, 
grandsons of Joan. In this line of descent 
it continued — subject to many of those 



128 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

infringements which are incidental to pov- 
erty — till 1806, when William Shakespeare 
Hart, the seventh in collateral kinship from 
the poet, sold it to Thomas Court, from 
whose family it was at last purchased for 
the British nation. Meantime the property, 
which originally consisted of two tenements 
and a considerable tract of adjacent land, 
had, little by little, been curtailed of its 
fair proportions by the sale of its gardens 
and orchards. The two tenements — two 
in one, that is — had been subdivided. A 
part of the building became an inn — at 
first called "The Maidenhead," afterward 
"The Swan," and finally " The Swan and 
Maidenhead." Another part became a 
butcher's shop. The old dormer windows 
and the pent-house disappeared. A new 
brick casing was foisted upon the tavern 
end of the structure. In front of the 
butcher's shop appeared a sign announc- 
ing " William Shakespeare was born in this 
house : N.B. — A Horse and Taxed Cart to 
Let." Still later appeared another legend, 
vouching that ' ' the immortal Shakespeare 
was born in this house." From 1793 till 
1820 Thomas and Mary Hornby, connections 
by marriage with the Harts, lived in the 
Shakespeare cottage — now at length become 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 29 

the resort of literary pilgrims, — and Mary 
Hornby, who set up to be a poet and wrote 
tragedy, comedy, and philosophy, took de- 
light in exhibiting its rooms to visitors. 
During the reign of that eccentric custodian 
the low ceilings and whitewashed walls of 
its several chambers became covered with 
autographs, scrawled thereon by many en- 
thusiasts, including some of the most famous 
persons in Europe. In 1820 Mary Hornby 
was requested to leave the premises. She 
did not wish to go. She could not endure 
the thought of a successor. "After me, 
the deluge ! " She was obliged to abdicate ; 
but she conveyed away all the furniture and 
relics alleged to be connected with Shake- 
speare's family, and she hastily whitewashed 
the cottage walls. Only a small part of the 
wall of the upper room, the chamber in 
which "nature's darling" first saw the 
light, escaped this act of spiteful sacrilege. 
On the space behind its door may still be 
read many names, with dates affixed, rang- 
ing back from 1820 to 1729. Among them 
is that of Dora Jordan, the beautiful and 
fascinating actress, who wrote it there June 
2, 1809. Much of Mary Hornby's white- 
wash, which chanced to be unsized, was 
afterward removed, so that her work of ob- 
i 



I30 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

literation proved only in part successful. 
Other names have been added to this singu- 
lar, chaotic scroll of worship. Byron, Scott, 1 
Rogers, Thackeray, Kean, Tennyson, and 
Dickens are among the votaries here and 
thus recorded. The successors of Mary 
Hornby guarded their charge with pious 
care. The precious value of the old Shake- 
speare cottage grew more and more evident 
to the English people. Washington Irving 
made his pilgrimage to Stratford and re- 
counted it in his beautiful Sketch-Book. 
Yet it was not till P. T. Barnum, from the 
United States, arrived with a proposition to 
buy the Shakespeare house and convey it 
to America that the literary enthusiasm of 
Great Britain was made to take a practical 
shape, and this venerated and inestimable 
relic became, in 1847, a national possession. 
In 1856 John Shakespeare, of Worthing- 
ton Field, near Ashby-de-la-Zouche, gave a 
large sum of money to restore it ; and 
within the next two years, under the super- 

1 Sir Walter Scott visited Shakespeare's birthplace 
in August, 1821, and at that time scratched his name 
on the window-pane. He had previously, in 1815, 
visited Kenilworth. He was in Stratford again in 
1828, and on April 8 he went to Shakespeare's grave, 
and subsequently drove to Charlecote. The visit of 
Lord Byron has been incorrectly assigned to the year 
1816. It occurred on August 28, possibly in 1812. 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 131 

intendence of Edward Gibbs and William 
Holtom of Stratford, it was isolated by the 
demolition of the cottages at its sides and 
in the rear, repaired wherever decay was 
visible, and set in perfect order. 

The builders of this house must have 
done their work thoroughly well, for even 
after all these years of rough usage and of 
slow but incessant decline the great timbers 
remain solid, the plastered walls are firm, 
the huge chimney-stack is as permanent as 
a rock, and the ancient flooring only betrays 
by the channelled aspect of its boards, and 
the high polish on the heads of the nails 
which fasten them down, that it belongs to 
a period of remote antiquity. The cottage 
stands close upon the margin of the street, 
according to ancient custom of . building 
throughout Stratford ; and, entering through 
a little porch, the pilgrim stands at once in 
that low-ceiled, flag-stoned room, with its 
wide fire-place, so familiar in prints of the 
chimney-corner of Shakespeare's youthful 
days. Within the fire-place, on either side, 
is a seat fashioned in the brick- work ; and 
here, as it is pleasant to imagine, the boy- 
poet often sat, on winter nights, gazing 
dreamily into the flames, and building castles 
in that fairy-land of fancy which was his 



132 SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 

celestial inheritance. You presently pass 
from this room by a narrow, well-worn stair- 
case to the chamber above, which is shown 
as the place of the poet's birth. An anti- 
quated chair, of the sixteenth century, 
stands in the right-hand corner. At the 
left is a small fire-place. Around the walls 
are visible the great beams which are the 
framework of the building — beams of 
seasoned oak that will last forever. Oppo- 
site to the door of entrance is a threefold 
casement (the original window) full of 
narrow panes of glass scrawled all over 
with names that their worshipful owners 
have written with diamonds. The ceiling 
is so low that you can easily touch it with 
uplifted hand. A portion of it is held in 
place by a network of little iron laths. 
This room, and indeed the whole struct- 
ure, is as polished and orderly as any 
waxen, royal hall in the Louvre, and it 
impresses observation much like old lace 
that has been treasured up with lavender 
or jasmine. These walls, which no one is 
now permitted to mar, were naturally the 
favourite scroll of the Shakespeare votaries 
of long ago. Every inch of the plaster bears 
marks of the pencil of reverence. Hundreds 
of names are written there — some of them 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 33 

famous but most of them obscure, and all 
destined to perish where they stand. On 
the chimney-piece at the right of the fire- 
place, which is named " The Actor's Pillar," 
many actors have inscribed their signa- 
tures. Edmund Kean wrote his name 
there — with what soulful veneration and 
spiritual sympathy it is awful even to try 
to imagine. Sir AY alter Scott's name is 
scratched with a diamond on the window 
— "W. Scott." That of Thackeray ap- 
pears on the ceiling, and upon the beam 
across the centre is that of Helen Faucit. 
Vestris's is written near the fireplace. Mark 
Lemon and Charles Dickens are together on 
the opposite wall. Byron wrote his name 
there, but it has disappeared. The list 
would include, among others, Elliston, Buck- 
stone, G. V. Brooke, Charles Kean, Charles 
Mathews, Eliza Vestris, and Eanny Fitz- 
william. But it is not of these offerings 
of fealty that you think when you sit and 
muse alone in that mysterious chamber. 
As once again I conjure up that strange 
and solemn scene, the sunshine rests in 
checkered squares upon the ancient floor, 
the motes swim in the sunbeams, the 
air is very cold, the place is hushed as 
death, and" over it all there broods an at- 



134 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

mosphere of grave suspense and mystical 
desolation — a sense of some tremendous 
energy stricken dumb and frozen into silence 
and past and gone forever. 

Opposite to the birthchaniber, at the rear, 
there is a small apartment, in which is dis- 
played "the Stratford Portrait " of the poet. 
This painting is said to have been owned by 
the Clopton family, and to have fallen into 
the hands of William Hunt, the town clerk 
of Stratford, who bought the mansion of the 
Cloptons in 1758. The adventures through 
which it passed can only be conjectured. It 
does not appear to have been valued, and al- 
though it remained in the house it was cast 
away among lumber and rubbish. In pro- 
cess of time it was painted over and changed 
into a different subject, Then it fell a prey 
to dirt and damp. There is a story that 
little boys of the tribe of Hunt were accus- 
tomed to use it as a target for their arrows. 
At last, after the lapse of a century, the 
grandson of William Hunt showed it by 
chance to Simon Collins, an artist, who 
surmised that a valuable portrait might 
perhaps exist beneath its muddy surface. 
It was carefully cleaned. A thick beard 
was removed, and the face of Shakespeare 
emerged upon the canvas. It is not pre- 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 35 

tended that this portrait was painted in 
Shakespeare's time. The close resemblance 
that it bears, — in attitude, dress, colours, 
and other peculiarities, — to the painted 
bust of the poet in Stratford church seems 
to indicate that it is a modern copy of that 
work. Upon a brass plate affixed to it is 
the following inscription : ' ' This portrait 
of Shakespeare, after being hi the posses- 
sion of Mr. William Oakes Hunt, town- 
clerk of Stratford, and his family, for 
upwards of a century, was restored to its 
original condition by Mr. Simon Collins of 
London, and, being considered a portrait 
of much interest and value, was given by 
Mr. Hunt to the town of Stratford-upon- 
Avon, to be preserved in Shakespeare's 
house, 23d April, 1862." There, accord- 
ingly, it remains, and in association with 
several other dubious presentments of the 
poet, cheerfully adds to the mental con- 
fusion of the pilgrim who would form an 
accurate ideal of Shakespeare's appear- 
ance. Standing in its presence it was 
worth while to reflect that there are only 
two authentic representations of Shake- 
speare in existence — the Droeshout por- 
trait and the Gerard Jonson bust. They 
may not be perfect works of art ; they may 



I36 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

not do justice to the original ; but they 
were seen and accepted by persons to 
whom Shakespeare had been a living com- 
panion. The bust was sanctioned by his 
children ; the portrait was sanctioned by 
his friend Ben Jonson, and by his brother 
actors Heminge and Condell, who prefixed 
it, in 1623, to the first folio of his works. 
Standing among the relics that have been 
gathered into a museum in an apartment on 
the ground-floor of the cottage it was essen- 
tial also to remember how often "the wish 
is father to the thought ' ' that sanctifies the 
uncertain memorials of the distant past. 
Several of the most suggestive documents, 
though, which bear upon the sparse and 
shadowy record of Shakespeare's life are 
preserved in this place. Here is a deed, 
made in 1596, which proves that this house 
was his father's residence. Here is the 
only letter addressed to him that is known 
to exist — the letter of Richard Quiney 
(1598) asking for the loan of thirty pounds. 
Here is a declaration in a suit, in 1604, to 
recover the price of some malt that he had 
sold to Philip Rogers. Here is a deed, dated 
1609, on which is the autograph of his 
brother Gilbert, who represented him at 
Stratford in his business affairs while he 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 37 

was absent in London, and who, surviving, 
it is dubiously said, almost till the period of 
the Kestoration, talked, as a very old man, 
of the poet's impersonation of Adam in As 
You Like It. (Possibly the reference of 
this legend is not to Gilbert but to a son 
of his. Gilbert would have been nearly a 
century old when Charles the Second came 
to the throne.) Here likewise is shown a 
gold seal ring, found many years ago in a 
field near Stratford church, on which, deli- 
cately engraved, appear the letters W. S., 
entwined with a true lovers' knot. It may 
have belonged to Shakespeare. The conjec- 
ture is that it did, and that, since on the 
last of the three sheets which contain his 
will the word "seal" is stricken out and 
the word "hand" substituted, he did not 
seal that document because he had only just 
then lost this ring. The supposition is, at 
least, ingenious. It will not harm the vis- 
itor to accept it. Nor, as he stands poring 
over the ancient, decrepit school-desk which 
has been lodged in this museum, from the 
grammar-school in Church Street, will it 
greatly tax his credulity to believe that the 
" shining morning face " of the boy Shake- 
speare once looked down upon it in the irk- 
some quest of his "small Latin and less 



I38 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

Greek." They call it "Shakespeare's desk.'" 
It is old, and it is known to have been in 
the school of the guild three hundred years 
ago. There are other relics, more or less 
indirectly connected with the great name 
that is here commemorated. The inspec- 
tion of them all would consume many 
days ; the description of them would oc- 
cupy many pages. You write your name 
in the visitors' book at parting, and per- 
haps stroll forth into the garden of the 
cottage, which encloses it at the sides and 
in the rear, and there, beneath the leafy 
boughs of the English lime, while your 
footsteps press " the grassy carpet of 
this plain," behold growing all around you 
the rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, 
rue, daisies, and violets, which make the 
imperishable garland on Ophelia's grave, 
and which are the fragrance of her solemn 
and lovely memory. 

Thousands of times the wonder must 
have been expressed that while the world 
knows so much about Shakespeare's mind 
it should know so little about his life. 
The date of his birth, even, is established 
by an inference. The register of Stratford 
church shows that he was baptised there 
in 1564, on the 26th of April. It was 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 39 

customary to baptise infants on the third 
day after their birth. It is presumed that 
the custom was followed in this instance, 
and hence it is deduced that Shakespeare 
was born on April 23 — a date which, mak- 
ing allowance for the difference between 
the old and new styles of reckoning time, 
corresponds to our third of May. Equally 
by an inference it is established that the 
boy was educated in the free grammar- 
school. The school was there ; and any 
boy of the town, who was seven years old 
and able to read, could get admission to it. 
Shakespeare's father, an alderman of Strat- 
ford (elected chief alderman, October 10, 
1571), and then a man of w r orldly substance, 
though afterward he became poor, would 
surely have wished that his children should 
grow up in knowledge. To the ancient 
school-house, accordingly, and the adjacent 
chapel of the guild — which are still extant, 
at the south-east corner of Chapel Lane 
and Church Street — the pilgrim confidently 
traces the footsteps of the poet. These build- 
ings are of singular, picturesque quaintness. 
The chapel dates back to about the middle 
of the thirteenth century. It was a Roman 
Catholic institution, founded in 1296, under 
the patronage of the Bishop of Worcester, 



140 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

and committed to the pious custody of the 
guild of Stratford. A hospital was con- 
nected with it in those days, and Robert 
de Stratford was its first master. New 
privileges and confirmation were granted to 
the guild by Henry the Fourth, in 1403 and 
1429. The grammar-school, established on 
an endowment of lands and tenements by 
Thomas Jolyffe, was set up in association 
with it in 1482. Toward the end of the 
reign of Henry the Seventh the whole of 
the chapel, excepting the chancel, was torn 
down and rebuilt under the munificent 
direction of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor 
of London and Stratford's chief citizen and 
benefactor. Under Henry the Eighth, when 
came the stormy times of the Reformation, 
the priests were driven out, the guild was 
dissolved, and the chapel was despoiled. 
Edward the Sixth, however, granted a new 
charter to this ancient institution, and with 
especial precautions reinstated the school. 
The chapel itself was occasionally used as a 
schoolroom when Shakespeare was a boy, 
and until as late as the year 1595 ; and in 
case the lad did go thither (in 1571) as a 
pupil, he must have been from childhood 
familiar with the series of grotesque paint- 
ings upon its walls, presenting, in a pictorial 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 141 

panorama, the history of the Holy Cross, 
from its origin as a tree at the beginning of 
the world to its exaltation at Jerusalem. 
Those paintings were brought to light in 
1804 in the course of a renovation of the 
chapel which then occurred, when the walls 
were relieved of thick coatings of whitewash, 
laid on them long before, in Puritan times, 
either to spoil or to hide from the spoiler. 
They are not visible now, but they were 
copied and have been engraved. The 
drawings of them, by Fisher, are in the 
collection of Shakespearean Rarities made 
by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps. This chapel 
and its contents constitute one of the few 
remaining spectacles at Stratford that bring 
us face to face with Shakespeare. During 
the last seven years of his life he dwelt 
almost continually in his house of New 
Place, on the corner immediately oppo- 
site to this church. The configuration of 
the excavated foundations of that house 
indicates what would now be called a deep 
bay-window in its southern front. There, 
probably, was Shakespeare's study; and 
through that casement, many and many a 
time, in storm and in sunshine, by night 
and by day, he must have looked out upon 
the grim, square tower, the embattled stone 



142 SHAKESPE ARE'S HOME. 

wall, and the four tall Gothic windows of 
that mysterious temple. The moment your 
gaze falls upon it, the low-breathed, horror- 
stricken words of Lady Macbeth murmur 
in your memory : — 

" The raven himself is hoarse 
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
Under my battlements." 

New Place, Shakespeare's home at the 
time of his death and the house in which 
he died, stood on the north-east corner of 
Chapel Street and Chapel Lane. Nothing 
now remains of it but a portion of its foun- 
dations — long buried in the earth, but 
found and exhumed in comparatively recent 
days. Its gardens have been redeemed, 
through the zealous and devoted exertions 
of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps and have been 
restored to what is thought to have been 
almost their condition when Shakespeare 
owned them. The crumbling fragments of 
the foundation are covered with screens of 
wood and wire. A mulberry-tree, a scion 
of the famous mulberry that Shakespeare 
is known to have planted, is growing on the 
lawn. There is no authentic picture in ex- 
istence that shows New Place as it was 
when Shakespeare left it, but there is a sketch 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 43 

of it as it appeared in 1740. The house was 
made of brick and timber, and was built by 
Sir Hugh Clopton nearly a century before 
it became by purchase the property of the 
poet. Shakespeare bought it in 1597, and 
in it he passed, intermittently, a consider- 
able part of the last nineteen years of his 
life. It had borne the name of New Place 
before it came into his possession. The 
Clopton family parted with it in 1563, and 
it was subsequently owned by families 
of Bott and Underhill. At Shakespeare's 
death it was inherited by his eldest daugh- 
ter, Susanna, wife to Dr. John Hall. In 
1643, Mrs. Hall, then seven years a widow, 
being still its owner and occupant, Henrietta 
Maria, queen to Charles the First, who had 
come to Stratford with a part of the royal 
army, resided for three days at New Place, 
which, therefore, must even then have been 
the most considerable private residence in 
the town. (The queen arrived at Stratford 
on July 11 and on July 13 she went to 
Kineton.) Mrs. Hall, dying in 1649, aged 
sixty -six, left it to her only child, Eliza- 
beth, then Mrs. Thomas Nashe, who after- 
ward became Lady Barnard, wife to Sir John 
Barnard, of Abingdon, and in whom the di- 
rect line of Shakespeare ended. After her 



144 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

death the estate was purchased by Sir Ed- 
ward Walker, in 1075, who ultimately left it 
to his daughter's husband, Sir John Clopton 
(1638-1719), and so it once more passed into 
the hands of the family of its founder. A sec- 
ond Sir Hugh Clopton (1671-1751) owned it 
at the middle of the eighteenth century, and 
under his direction it was repaired, deco- 
rated, and furnished with a new front. That 
proved the beginning of the end of this old 
structure, as a relic of Shakespeare ; for this 
owner, dying in 1751, bequeathed it to his 
son-in-law, Henry Talbot, who in 1753 sold 
it to the most universally execrated icono- 
clast of modern times, the Rev. Francis 
Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, in Cheshire, 
by whom it was destroyed. Mr. Gastrell 
was a man of fortune, and he certainly was 
one of insensibility. He knew little of 
Shakespeare, but he knew that the frequent 
incursion, into his garden, of strangers who 
came to sit beneath "Shakespeare's mul- 
berry " was a troublesome annoyance. He 
struck, therefore, at the root of the vexa- 
tion and cut down the tree. That was in 
1756. The wood was purchased by Thomas 
Sharp, a watchmaker of Stratford, who sub- 
sequently made the solemn declaration that 
he carried it to his home and converted it 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. I45 

into toys and kindred memorial relics. The 
villagers of Stratford, meantime, incensed 
at the barbarity of Mr. Gastrell, took their 
revenge by breaking his windows. In this 
and in other ways the clergyman was prob- 
ably made to realise his local unpopularity. 
It had been his custom to reside 'during a 
part of each year in Lichfield, leaving some 
of his servants in charge of New Place. 
The overseers of Stratford, having lawful 
authority to levy a tax, for the maintenance 
of the poor, on every house in the town 
valued at more than forty shillings a year, 
did not neglect to make a vigorous use of 
their privilege in the case of Mr. Gastrell. 
The result of their exactions in the sacred 
cause of charity was significant. In 1759 
Mr. Gastrell declared that the house should 
qever be taxed again, pulled down the 
building, sold the materials of which it had 
been composed, and left Stratford forever. 
In the house adjacent to the site of what 
was once Shakespeare's home has been 
established a museum of Shakespearean 
relics. Among them is a stone mullion, 
found on the site, which may have belonged 
to a window of the original mansion. This 
estate, bought from different owners and 
restored to its Shakespearean condition, 



I46 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

became, on April 17, 1876, the property 
of the corporation of Stratford. The tract 
of land is not large. The visitor may trav- 
erse the whole of it in a few minutes, al- 
though if he obey his inclination he will 
linger there for hours. The enclosure is 
an irregular rectangle, about two hundred 
feet long. The lawn is perfect. The mul- 
berry is extant and tenacious, and wears its 
honours in contented vigour. Other trees 
give grateful shade to the grounds, and the 
voluptuous red roses, growing all around in 
rich profusion, load the air with fragrance. 
Eastward, at a little distance, flows the 
Avon. Not far away rises the graceful spire 
of the Holy Trinity. A few rooks, hovering 
in the air and wisely bent on some facetious 
mischief, send down through the silver haze 
of the summer morning their sagacious yet 
melancholy caw. The windows of the gray 
chapel across the street twinkle and keep 
their solemn secret. On this spot was first 
waved the mystic wand of Prospero. Here 
Ariel sang of dead men's bones turned into 
pearl and coral in the deep caverns of the 
sea. Here arose into everlasting life Her- 
mione, " as tender as infancy and grace." 
Here were created Miranda and Perdita, 
twins of heaven's own radiant goodness, — 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. I47 

" Daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, 
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
Or Cytherea's breath." 

To endeavour to touch upon the larger 
and more august aspect of Shakespeare's 
life — when, as his wonderful sonnets be- 
tray, his great heart had felt the devasta- 
ting blast of cruel passions and the deepest 
knowledge of the good and evil of the uni- 
verse had been borne in upon his soul — 
would be impious presumption. Happily 
to the stroller in Stratford every association 
connected with him is gentle and tender. 
His image, as it rises there, is of smiling 
boyhood or sedate and benignant maturity; 
always either joyous or serene, never pas- 
sionate, or turbulent, or dark. The pilgrim 
thinks of him as a happy child at his father's 
fireside ; as a wondering school-boy in the 
quiet, venerable close of the old guild 
chapel, where still the only sound that 
breaks the silence is the chirp of birds or 
the creaking of the church vane ; as a hand- 
some, dauntless youth, sporting by his be- 
loved river or roaming through field and 
forest many miles around ; as the bold, ad- 
venturous spirit, bent on frolic and mischief, 



I48 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME 

and not averse to danger, leading, perhaps, 
the wild lads of his village in their poaching 
depredations on the chace of Charlecote ; as 
the lover, strolling through the green lanes 
of Shottery, hand in hand with the darling 
of his first love, while round them the 
honeysuckle breathed out its fragrant heart 
upon the winds of night, and overhead the 
moonlight, streaming through rifts of elm 
and poplar, fell on their pathway in showers 
of shimmering silver; and, last of all, as the 
illustrious poet, rooted and secure in his 
massive and shining fame, loved by many, 
and venerated and mourned by all, borne 
slowly through Stratford churchyard, while 
the golden bells were tolled in sorrow and 
the mourning lime-trees dropped their blos- 
soms on his bier, to the place of his eternal 
rest. Through all the scenes incidental to 
this experience the worshipper of Shake- 
speare's genius may follow him every step 
of the way. The old foot-path across the 
fields to Shottery remains accessible. Wild- 
flowers are blooming along its margin. The 
gardens and meadows through which it 
winds are sprinkled with the gorgeous scar- 
let of the poppy. The hamlet of Shottery 
is less than a mile from Stratford, stepping 
toward the sunset ; and there, nestled be- 






SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. I49 

neatli the elms, and almost embowered in 
vines and roses, stands the cottage in which 
Anne Hathaway was wooed and won. This 
is even more antiquated in appearance than 
the birthplace of Shakespeare, and more 
obviously a relic of the distant past. It is 
built of wood and plaster, ribbed with mas- 
sive timbers, and covered with a thatch roof. 
It fronts southward, presenting its eastern 
end to the road. Under its eaves, peeping 
through embrasures cut in the thatch, are 
four tiny casements, round which the ivy 
twines and the roses wave softly in the 
wind of June. The western end of the 
structure is higher than the eastern, and 
the old building, originally divided into two 
tenements, is now divided into three. In 
front of it is a straggling garden. There is 
a comfortable air of wildness, yet not of 
neglect, in its appointments and surround- 
ings. The place is still the abode of labour 
and lowliness. Entering its parlour you 
see a stone floor, a wide fireplace, a broad, 
hospitable hearth, with cosy chimney-cor- 
ners, and near this an old wooden settle, 
much decayed but still serviceable, on 
which Shakespeare may often have sat, 
with Anne at his side. The plastered walls 
of this room here and there reveal portions 



I50 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

of an oak wainscot. The ceiling is low. 
This evidently was the farm-house of a sub- 
stantial yeoman, in the days of Henry the 
Eighth. The Hathaways had lived in Shot- 
tery for forty years prior to Shakespeare's 
marriage. The poet, then undistinguished, 
had just turned eighteen, while his bride 
was nearly twenty-six, and it has been 
foolishly said that she acted ill in wedding 
this boy-lover. They were married in No- 
vember, 1582, and their first child, Susanna, 
came in the following May. Anne Hatha- 
way must have been a wonderfully fasci- 
nating woman, or Shakespeare would not so 
have loved her ; and she must have loved 
him dearly — as what woman, indeed, could 
help it ? — or she would not thus have 
yielded to his passion. There is direct 
testimony to the beauty of his person ; and 
in the light afforded by his writings it re- 
quires no extraordinary penetration to con- 
jecture that his brilliant mind, sparkling 
humour, tender fancy, and impetuous spirit 
must have made him, in his youth, a para- 
gon of enchanters. It is not known where 
they lived during the first years after their 
marriage. Perhaps in this cottage at Shot- 
tery. Perhaps with Hamnet and Judith 
Sadler, for whom their twins, born in 1585, 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. I51 

were named Hamnet and Judith. Her 
father's house assuredly would have been 
chosen for Anne's refuge, when presently 
(in 1585-86), Shakespeare was obliged to 
leave his wife and children, and go away 
to London to seek his fortune. He did not 
buy New Place till 1597, but it is known 
that in the meantime he came to his native 
town once every year. It was in Stratford 
that his son Hamnet died, in 1596. Anne 
and her children probably had never left 
the town. They show a bedstead and other 
bits of furniture, together with certain 
homespun sheets of everlasting linen, that 
are kept as heirlooms in the garret of the 
Shottery cottage. Here is the room that 
may often have welcomed the poet when he 
came home from his labours in the great 
city. It is a homely and humble place, 
but the sight of it makes the heart thrill 
with a strange and incommunicable awe. 
You cannot wish to speak when you are 
standing there. You are scarcely conscious 
of the low rustling of the leaves outside, 
the far-off sleepy murmur of the brook, or 
the faint fragrance of woodbine and maid- 
en' s-blush that is wafted in at the open 
casement and that swathes in nature's in- 
cense a memory sweeter than itself. 



I52 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

Associations may be established by fable 
as well as by fact. There is but little rea- 
son to believe the legendary tale, first re- 
corded by Rowe, that Shakespeare, having 
robbed the deer-park of Sir Thomas Lucy 
of Charlecote (there was not a park at 
Charlecote then, but there was one at Full- 
brooke), was so severely persecuted by that 
magistrate that he was compelled to quit 
Stratford and shelter himself in London. 
Yet the story has twisted itself into all the 
lives of Shakespeare, and whether received 
or rejected has clung to the house of Charle- 
cote. That noble mansion — a genuine 
specimen, despite a few modern alterations, 
of the architecture of Queen Elizabeth's 
time — is found on the west bank of the 
Avon, about three miles north-east from 
Stratford. It is a long, rambling, three- 
storied palace — as finely quaint as old 
St. James's in London, and not altogether 
unlike that edifice in general character — 
with octagon turrets, gables, balustrades, 
Tudor casements, and great stacks of chim- 
neys, so closed in by elms of giant growth 
that you can scarce distinguish it through 
the foliage till you are close upon it. It 
was erected in 1558 by Thomas Lucy, who 
in 1578 was Sheriff of Warwickshire, who 



SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 1 53 

was elected to the Parliaments of 1571 and 
1584, and who was knighted by Queen 
Elizabeth in 1565. The porch to this build- 
ing was designed by John of Padua. There 
is a silly ballad in existence, idly attrib- 
uted to Shakespeare, which, it is said, was 
found affixed to Lucy's gate, and gave him 
great offence. He must have been more 
than commonly sensitive to low abuse if he 
could have been annoyed by such a mani- 
festly scurrilous ebullition of the blackguard 
and the blockhead, — supposing, indeed, 
that he ever saw it. The ballad, proffered 
as the work of Shakespeare, is a forgery. 
There is but one existing reason to think 
that the poet ever cherished a grudge against 
the Lucy family, and that is the coarse al- 
lusion to the "luces" which is found in 
the Merry Wives of Windsor. There was 
apparently, a second Sir Thomas Lucy, 
later than the Sheriff, who was more of the 
Puritanic breed, while Shakespeare evi- 
dently was a Cavalier. It is possible that 
in a youthful frolic the poet may have 
poached on Sheriff Lucy's preserves. Even 
so, the affair was trivial. It is possible, 
too, that in after years he may have had 
reason to dislike the ultra-Puritanical neigh- 
bour. Some memory of the tradition will, 



154 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

of course, haunt the traveller's thoughts as 
he strolls by Hatton Kock and through the 
villages of Hampton and Charlecote. But 
this discordant recollection is soon smoothed 
away by the peaceful loveliness of the ram- 
ble — past aged hawthorns that Shakespeare 
himself may have seen, and under the 
boughs of beeches, limes, and drooping 
willows, where every footstep falls on wild- 
flowers, or on a cool green turf that is 
softer than Indian silk and as firm and 
elastic as the sand of the sea-beaten shore. 
Thought of Sir Thomas Lucy will not be 
otherwise than kind, either, when the 
stranger in Charlecote church reads the 
epitaph with which the old knight com- 
memorated his wife : ' ' All the time of her 
Lyfe a true and faithfull servant of her 
good God ; never detected of any crime or 
vice ; in religion most sound ; in love to her 
husband most faithfull and true. In friend- 
ship most constant. To what in trust was 
committed to her most secret; in wisdom 
excelling; in governing her House and bring- 
ing up of Youth in the feare of God that 
did converse with her most rare and singu- 
lar ; a great maintainer of hospitality ; 
greatly esteemed of her betters ; misliked 
of none unless the envious. When all is 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 55 

spoken that can be said, a Woman so fur- 
nished and garnished with Virtue as not to 
be bettered, and hardly to be equalled of 
any ; as she lived most virtuously, so she 
dyed most godly. Set down by him that 
best did know what hath been written to be 
true. Thomas Lucy." A narrow formalist 
he may have been, and a severe magistrate 
in his dealings with scapegrace youths, and 
perhaps a haughty and disagreeable neigh- 
bour ; but there is a touch of manhood, 
high feeling, and virtuous and self-respect- 
ing character in those lines that instantly 
wins the response of sympathy. If Shake- 
speare really shot the deer of Thomas Lucy 
the injured gentleman had a right to feel 
annoyed. Shakespeare, boy or man, was 
not a saint, and those who so account him 
can have read his works to but little pur- 
pose. He can bear the full brunt of his 
faults. He does not need to be canonised. 
The ramble to Charlecote — one of the 
prettiest walks about Stratford — was, it 
may surely be supposed, often taken by 
Shakespeare. Many another ramble was 
possible to him and no doubt was made. 
He would cross the mill bridge (new in 
1599), which spans the Avon a little way 
to the south of the church. A quaint, sleepy 



I56 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

mill no doubt it was — flecked with moss 
and ivy — and the gaze of Shakespeare 
assuredly dwelt on it with pleasure. His 
footsteps may be traced, also, in fancy, to 
the region of the old college building, de- 
molished in 1799, which stood in the 
southern part of Stratford, and was the 
home of his friend John Combe, factor of 
Fulke Greville, Earl of Warwick. Still 
another of his walks must have tended 
northward through Welcombe, where he 
was the owner of land, to the portly manor 
of Clopton, or to the home of William, 
nephew of John-a- Combe, which stood 
where the Phillips mansion stands now. 
On what is called the "Ancient House," 
which stands on the west side of High 
Street, he may often have looked, as he 
strolled past to the Red Horse. That pic- 
turesque building, dated 159G, survives, 
notwithstanding some modern touches of 
rehabilitation, as a beautiful specimen of 
Tudor architecture in one at least of its 
most charming traits, the carved and tim- 
ber-crossed gable. It is a house of three 
stories, containing parlour, sitting-room, 
kitchen, and several bedrooms, besides 
cellars and brew- shed ; and when sold at 
auction, August 23, 1876, it brought £400. 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 57 

In that house was born John Harvard, who 
founded Harvard University. There are 
other dwellings fully as old in Stratford, 
but they have been covered with stucco and 
otherwise changed. This is a genuine piece 
of antiquity and it vies with the grammar- 
school and the hall of the Guild, under 
the pent-house of which the poet would pass 
whenever he went abroad from New Place. 
Julius Shaw, one of the five witnesses to 
his will, lived in the house next to the pres- 
ent New Place Museum, and there, it is 
reasonable to think, Shakespeare would 
often pause, for a word with his friend and 
neighbour. In the little streets by the 
river-side, which are ancient and redolent 
of the past, his image seems steadily fa- 
miliar. In Dead Lane (once also called 
Walker Street, now called Chapel Lane) he 
owned a cottage, bought of Walter Getley 
in 1602, and only destroyed within the 
present century. These and kindred shreds 
of fact, suggesting the poet as a living 
man and connecting him, however vaguely, 
with our everyday experience, are seized 
with peculiar zest by the pilgrim in Strat- 
ford. Such a votary, for example, never 
doubts that Shakespeare was a frequenter, 
in leisure or convivial hours, of the ancient 



I58 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

Red Horse inn. It stood there, in his day, 
as it stands now, on the north side of 
Bridge Street, westward from the Avon. 
There are many other taverns in the town 
— the Shakespeare, a delightful resort, the 
Falcon, the Rose and Crown, the old Red 
Lion, and the Swan's Nest, heing a few 
of them — hut the Red Horse takes prece- 
dence of all its kindred, in the fascinating 
because suggestive attribute of antiquity. 
Moreover it was the Red Horse that har- 
boured Washington Irving, the pioneer of 
American worshippers at the shrine of 
Shakespeare ; and the American explorer 
of Stratford would cruelly sacrifice his 
peace of mind if he were to repose under 
any other roof. The Red Horse is a ram- 
bling, three-story building, entered through 
an archway that leads into a long, strag- 
gling yard, adjacent to offices and stables. 
On one side of the entrance is found the 
smoking-room ; on the other is the coffee- 
room. Above are the bed-rooms. It is 
a thoroughly old-fashioned inn — such a 
one as we may suppose the Boar's Head 
to have been, in the time of Prince Henry ; 
such a one as untravelled Americans only 
know in the pages of Dickens. The rooms 
are furnished in neat, homelike style, and 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 59 

their associations readily deck them with 
the fragrant garlands of memory. When 
Drayton and Jonson came down to visit 
"gentle Will" at Stratford they could 
scarcely have omitted to quaff the humming 
ale of AVarwickshire in that cosy parlour. 
When Queen Henrietta Maria was ensconced 
at New Place the general of the royal 
forces quartered himself at the Eed Horse, 
and then doubtless there was enough and 
to spare of revelry within its walls. A 
little later the old house was soundly pep- 
pered by Roundhead bullets and the whole 
town was overrun with the close- cropped, 
psalm-singing soldiers of the Common- 
wealth. In 1742 Garrick and Macklin 
lodged in the Red Horse, and thither again 
came Garrick in 1769, to direct the Shake- 
speare Jubilee, which was then most dis- 
mally accomplished but which is always 
remembered to the great actor's credit and 
honour. Betterton, no doubt, lodged there 
when he came to Stratford in quest of 
reminiscences of Shakespeare. The visit 
of Washington Irving, supplemented with 
his delicious chronicle, has led to what 
might be called almost the consecration of 
the parlour in which he sat and the chamber 
(No. 15) in which he slept. They still keep 



l6o SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

the poker — now marked "Geoffrey Cray- 
on's sceptre " — with which, as he sat there 
in long, silent, ecstatic meditation, he 
prodded the fire in the narrow, tiny grate. 
They keep also the chair in which he sat — 
a plain, straight-backed arm-chair, with a 
haircloth seat, marked, on a brass plate, 
with his renowned and treasured name. 
Thus genius can sanctify even the humblest 
objects, 

" And shed a something of celestial light 
Round the familiar face of every day." 

To pass rapidly in review the little that 
is known of Shakespeare's life is, neverthe- 
less, to be impressed not only by its inces- 
sant and amazing literary fertility but by 
the quick succession of its salient incidents. 
The vitality must have been enormous that 
created in so short a time such a number 
and variety of works of the first class. The 
same "quick spirit " would naturally have 
kept in agitation all the elements of his daily 
experience. Descended from an ancestor 
who had fought for the Red Rose on Bos- 
worth Field, he was born to repute as well 
as competence, and during his early child- 
hood he received instruction and training in 
a comfortable home. He escaped the plague 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. l6l 

that was raging in Stratford when he was 
an infant, and that took many victims. 
He went to school when seven years old and 
left it when about fourteen. He then had 
to work for his living — his once opulent 
father having fallen into misfortune — and 
he became an apprentice to a butcher, or 
else a lawyer's clerk (there were seven 
lawyers in Stratford at that time), or else a 
school-teacher. Perhaps he was all three 
— and more. It is conjectured that he saw 
the players who from time to time acted in 
the Guildhall, under the auspices of the cor- 
poration of Stratford; that he attended the 
religious entertainments that were custom- 
arily given in the not distant city of Coven- 
try; and that in particular he witnessed the 
elaborate and sumptuous pageants with 
which in 1575 the Earl of Leicester welcomed 
Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth Castle. He 
married at eighteen ; and, leaving a wife 
and three children in Stratford, he went up 
to London at twenty-two. His entrance 
into theatrical life followed — in what ca- 
pacity it is impossible to say. One dubi- 
ous account says that he held horses for the 
public at the theatre door ; another that he 
got employment as a prompter to the actors. 
It is certain that he had not been in the 



1 62 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

theatrical business long before lie began to 
make himself known. At twenty-eight he 
was a prosperous author. At twenty-nine 
he had acted with Burbage before Queen 
Elizabeth ; and while Spenser had ex- 
tolled him in the "Tears of the Muses," 
the hostile Greene had disparaged him in 
the " Groat' s-worth of Wit." At thirty- 
three he had acquired wealth enough to 
purchase New Place, the principal residence 
in his native town, where now he placed his 
family and established his home, — himself 
remaining in London, but visiting Stratford 
at frequent intervals. At thirty-four he 
was heard of as the actor of Knowell in 
Ben Jonson's comedy of Every Man in his 
Humour, 1 and he received the glowing 
encomium of Meres in WWs Treasury. At 
thirty-eight he had written Hamlet and As 
You Like It, and moreover he had now 
become the owner of more estate in Strat- 
ford, costing him £320. At forty-one he 

1 Jonson's famous comedy was first acted in 
1598, " by the then Lord Chamberlain his servants." 
Knowell is designated as " an old gentleman." The 
Jonson Folio of 1692 names as follows the principal 
comedians who acted in that piece : " Will. Shake- 
speare. Aug. Philips. Hen. Condel. Will. Slye. Will. 
Kempe. Ric. Burbadge. Joh. Hemings. Tho. Pope. 
Chr. Beston. Joh. Duke." 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 63 

made his largest purchase, buying for £440 
the "unexpired term of a moiety of the 
interest in a lease granted in 1554 for ninety- 
two years of the tithes of Stratford, Bishop- 
ton, and Welcombe." In the meantime 
he had smoothed the declining years of his 
father and had followed him with love and 
duty to the grave. Other domestic bereave- 
ments likewise befell him, and other worldly 
cares and duties were laid upon his hands, 
but neither grief nor business could check 
the fertility of his brain. Within the next 
ten years he wrote, among other great plays, 
Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. 
At about forty-eight he seems to have dis- 
posed of his interest in the two London 
theatres with which he had been connected, 
the Blackfriars and the Globe, and shortly 
afterward, his work as we possess it being 
well-nigh completed, he retired finally to his 
Stratford home. That he was the comrade 
of many bright spirits who glittered in " the 
spacious times " of Elizabeth several of them 
have left personal testimony. That he was 
the king of them all is shown in his works. 
The Sonnets seem to disclose that there was 
a mysterious, almost a tragical, passage in 
his life, and that he was called to bear the 
burden of a great and perhaps a calamitous 



164 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

personal grief — one of those griefs, which, 
being caused by sinful love, are endless in 
the punishment they entail. Happily, 
however, no antiquarian student of Shake- 
speare's time has yet succeeded in coming 
near to the man. While he was in London 
he used to frequent the Falcon Tavern, in 
Southwark, and the Mermaid, and he lived 
at one time in St. Helen's parish, Alders- 
gate, and at another time in Clink Street, 
Southwark. As an actor his name has been 
associated with his characters of Adam, 
Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost of King 
Hamlet, and a contemporary reference de- 
clared him " excellent in the quality he pro- 
fesses." Some of his manuscripts, it is 
possible, perished in the fire that consumed 
the Globe theatre in 1613. He passed his 
last clays in his home at Stratford, and died 
there, somewhat suddenly, on his fifty-sec- 
ond birthday. That event, it may be worth 
while to observe, occurred within thirty- 
three years of the execution of Charles the 
First, under the Puritan Commonwealth of 
Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan spirit, intol- 
erant of the play-house and of all its works, 
must then have been gaining formidable 
strength. His daughter Susanna, aged 
thirty-three at the time of his death, sur- 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 65 

vived him thirty-three years. His daughter 
Judith, aged thirty-one at the time of his 
death, survived him forty-six years. The 
whisper of tradition says that both were 
Puritans. If so the strange and seemingly 
unaccountable disappearance of whatever 
play-house papers he may have left at 
Stratford should not be obscure. This sug- 
gestion is likely to have been made before ; 
and also it is likely to have been supple- 
mented with a reference to the great fire in 
London in 1666 — (which in consuming St. 
Paul's cathedral burned an immense quan- 
tity of books and manuscripts that had 
been brought from all the threatened parts 
of the city and heaped beneath its arches for 
safety) — as probably the final and effectual 
holocaust of almost every piece of print or 
writing that might have served to illuminate 
the history of Shakespeare. In his per- 
sonality no less than in the fathomless 
resources of his genius he baffles scrutiny 
and stands for ever alone. 

"Others abide our question; thou art free: 
We ask, and ask ; thou smilest and art still — 
Out-topping knowledge." 

It is impossible to convey an adequate 
suggestion of the prodigious and overwhelm- 



1 66 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

ing sense of peace that falls upon the soul 
of the pilgrim in Stratford church. All the 
cares and struggles and trials of mortal life, 
all its failures, and equally all its achieve- 
ments, seem there to pass utterly out of 
remembrance. It is not now an idle reflec- 
tion that ' ' the paths of glory lead but to 
the grave." No power of human thought 
ever rose higher or went further than the 
thought of Shakespeare. No human being, 
using the best weapons of intellectual 
achievement, ever accomplished so much. 
Yet here he lies — who was once so great ! 
And here also, gathered around him in 
death, lie his parents, his children, his de- 
scendants, and his friends. For him and 
for them the struggle has long since ended. 
Let no man fear to tread the dark pathway 
that Shakespeare has trodden before him. 
Let no man, standing at this grave, and 
seeing and feeling that all the vast labours 
of that celestial genius end here at last in 
a handful of dust, fret and grieve any more 
over the puny and evanescent toils of to- 
day, so soon to be buried in oblivion ! In 
the simple performance of duty and in the 
life of the affections there may be perma- 
nence and solace. The rest is an " insub- 
stantial pageant." It breaks, it changes, 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 67 

it dies, it passes away, it is forgotten ; 
and though a great name be now and then 
for a little while remembered, what can the 
remembrance of mankind signify to him 
who once wore it? Shakespeare, there is 
reason to believe, set precisely the right 
value alike upon renown in his time and 
the homage of posterity. Though he went 
forth, as the stormy impulses of his nature 
drove him, into the great world of London, 
and there laid the firm hand of conquest 
upon the spoils of wealth and power, he 
came back at last to the peaceful home of 
his childhood ; he strove to garner up the 
comforts and everlasting treasures of love 
at his hearth-stone ; he sought an enduring 
monument in the hearts of friends and com- 
panions ; and so he won for his stately 
sepulchre the garland not alone of glory 
but of affection. Through the high eastern 
window of the chancel of Holy Trinity 
church the morning sunshine, broken into 
many-coloured light, streams in upon the 
grave of Shakespeare and gilds his bust 
upon the wall above it. He lies close by 
the altar, and every circumstance of his 
place of burial is eloquent of his hold upon 
the affectionate esteem of his contempora- 
ries. The line of graves beginning at 



1 68 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

the north wall of the chancel and extend- 
ing across to the south seems devoted en- 
tirely to Shakespeare and his family, with 
but one exception. 1 The pavement that 
covers them is of that blue-gray slate or 
freestone which in England is sometimes 
called black marble. In the first grave 
under the north wall rests Shakespeare's 
wife. The next is that of the poet himself, 
bearing the world-famed words of blessing 
and imprecation. Then comes the grave of 
Thomas Nashe, husband to Elizabeth Hall, 
the poet's granddaughter, who died April 4, 
1647. Next is that of Dr. John Hall (obiit 
November 25, 1G35), husband to his daugh- 
ter Susanna, and close beside him rests 
Susanna herself, who was buried on July 
11, 1649. The gravestones are laid east 
and west, and all but one present inscrip- 
tions. That one is under the south wall, 
and possibly it covers the dust of Judith — 
Mrs. Thomas Quiney — the youngest daugh- 
ter of Shakespeare, who, surviving her three 
children and thus leaving no descendants, 
died in 1662. Upon the gravestone of Su- 
sanna an inscription has been intruded com- 

1 " The poet knew," says J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, 
" that as a tithe-owner he would necessarily be buried 
in the chancel." 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 69 

memorative of Richard Watts, who is not, 
however, known to have had any relationship 
with either Shakespeare or his descendants. 
Shakespeare's father, who died in 1601, and 
his mother, Mary Arden, who died in 1608, 
were buried somewhere in this church. (The 
register says, under Burials, "September 9, 
1608, Mayry Shaxspere, wydowe.") His 
infant sisters Joan, Margaret, and Anne, 
and his brother Richard, who died, aged 
thirty-nine, in 1613, may also have been 
laid to rest in this place. Of the death and 
burial of his brother Gilbert there is no 
record. His sister Joan, the second — Mrs. 
Hart — would naturally have been placed 
with her relatives. His brother Edmund, 
dying in 1607, aged twenty-seven, is under 
the pavement of St. Saviour's church in 
Southwark. The boy Hamnet, dying before 
his father had risen into local eminence, 
rests, probably, in an undistinguished grave 
in the churchyard. (The registry records 
his burial on August 11, 1596.) The family 
of Shakespeare seems to have been short- 
lived and it was soon extinguished. He him- 
self died at fifty -two. Judith's children all 
perished young. Susanna bore but one 
child — Elizabeth — who became succes- 
sively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Barnard, and 



170 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abingdon, 
near Oxford. She left no children by either 
husband, and in her the race of Shakespeare 
became extinct. That of Anne Hathaway 
also has nearly disappeared, the last living 
descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs. 
Baker, the present occupant of Anne's cot- 
tage at Shottery. Thus, one by one, from 
the pleasant gardened town of Stratford, 
they went to take up their long abode in 
that old church, which was ancient even in 
their infancy, and which, watching through 
the centuries in its monastic solitude on the 
shore of Avon, has seen their lands and 
houses devastated by flood and fire, the 
places that knew them changed by the tooth 
of time, and almost all the associations of 
their lives obliterated by the improving hand 
of destruction. 

One of the oldest and most interesting 
Shakespearean documents in existence is 
the narrative, by a traveller named Dowclall, 
of his observations in Warwickshire, and 
of his visit, on April 10, 1G98, to Stratford 
church. He describes therein the bust and 
the tombstone of Shakespeare, and he adds 
these remarkable words: "The clerk that 
showed me this church is above eighty years 
ofd. He says that not one, for fear of the 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 171 

curse above said, dare touch his gravestone, 
though his wife and daughter did earnestly 
desire to be laid in the same grave with 
him." Writers in modern days have been 
pleased to disparage that inscription and to 
conjecture that it was the work of a sexton 
and not of the poet ; but no one denies that 
it has accomplished its purpose in preserv- 
ing the sanctity of Shakespeare's rest. Its 
rugged strength, its simple pathos, its fit- 
ness, and its sincerity make it felt as un- 
questionably the utterance of Shakespeare 
himself, when it is read upon the slab that 
covers him. There the musing traveller full 
well conceives how clearly the poet must 
have loved the beautiful scenes of his birth- 
place, and with what intense longing he 
must have desired to sleep undisturbed in 
the most sacred spot in their bosom. He 
doubtless had some premonition of his ap- 
proaching death. Three months before it 
came he made his will. A little later he 
saw the marriage of his younger daughter. 
Within less than a month of his death he 
executed the will, and thus set his affairs 
in order. His handwriting in the three 
signatures to that paper conspicuously ex- 
hibits the uncertainty and lassitude of shat- 
tered nerves. He was probably quite worn 



172 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

out. Within the space, at the utmost, of 
twenty-five years, he had written thirty- 
seven plays, one hundred and fifty -four 
sonnets, and two or more long poems ; had 
passed through much and painful toil and 
through bitter sorrow ; had made his for- 
tune as author and actor ; and had superin- 
tended, to excellent advantage, his property 
in London and his large interests in Strat- 
ford and its neighbourhood. The proclama- 
tion of health with which the will begins 
was doubtless a formality of legal custom. 
The story that he died of drinking too hard 
at a merry meeting with Drayton and Ben 
Jonson is idle gossip. If in those last 
days of fatigue and presentiment he wrote 
the epitaph that has ever since marked his 
grave, it would naturally have taken the 
plainest fashion of speech. Such is its 
character ; and no pilgrim to the poet's 
shrine could wish to see it changed : — 

" Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, 
To digg the dvst encloased heare ; 
Blese be y e man y l spares thes stones 
And cvrst be he y l moves my bones." 

It was once surmised that the poet's 
solicitude lest his bones might be disturbed 
in death grew out of his intention to take 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 73 

with him into the grave a confession that 
the works which now "follow him" were 
written by another hand. Persons have 
been found who actually believe that a man 
who was great enough to write Hamlet 
could be little enough to feel ashamed of it, 
and, accordingly, that Shakespeare was only 
hired to play at authorship as a screen for 
the actual author. It might not, perhaps, 
be strange that a desire for singularity, 
which is one of the worst literary crazes 
of this capricious age, should prompt to the 
rejection of the conclusive and overwhelm- 
ing testimony to Shakespeare's genius that 
has been left by Shakespeare's contempo- 
raries, and that shines forth in all that is 
known of his life. It is strange that a 
doctrine should get itself asserted which is 
subversive of common reason and contra- 
dictory to every known law of the human 
mind. This conjectural confession of poetic 
imposture has never been exhumed. The 
grave is known to have been disturbed in 
1796, when alterations were made in the 
church, 1 and there came a time in the pres- 

1 It was the opinion — not conclusive but inter- 
esting—of the late J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps that at 
one or other of these "restorations" the original 
tombstone of Shakespeare was removed and an- 



174 SHAKESPEARE S HOME. 

ent century when, as they were making 
repairs in the chancel pavement (the chan- 
cel was renovated in 1835), a rift was ac- 
cidentally made in the Shakespeare vault. 
Through this, though not without misgiv- 
ing, the sexton peeped in upon the poet's 
remains. He saw nothing but dust. 

The antique font from which the infant 
Shakespeare may have received the water 
of Christian baptism is still preserved in 
this church. It was thrown aside and re- 
placed by a new one about the middle of 
the seventeenth century. Many years after- 
ward it was found in the charnel-house. 
When that was destroyed, in 1800, it was 
cast into the churchyard. In later times the 
parish clerk used it as a trough to his pump. 
It passed then through the hands of several 
successive owners, till at last, in days that 
had learned to value the past and the asso- 
ciations connected with its illustrious names, 

other one, from the yard of a modern stone-mason, 
put in its place. Dr. Ingleby, in his book on 
" Shakespeare's Bones," 1S83, asserts that the orig- 
inal stone was removed. I have compared Shake- 
speare's tombstone with that of his wife, and with 
others in the chancel, but I have not found the dis- 
crepancy observed by Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, and 
I think there is no reason to believe that the origi- 
nal tombstone has ever been disturbed. The letters 
upon it were, probably, cut deeper in 1835. 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 75 

it found its way back again to the sanctuary 
from which it had suffered such a rude ex- 
pulsion. It is still a handsome stone, though 
broken, soiled, and marred. 

On the north wall of the chancel, above 
his grave and near to " the American win- 
dow," is placed Shakespeare's monument. 
It is known to have been erected there 
within seven years after his death. It con- 
sists of a half-length effigy, placed beneath 
a fretted arch, with entablature and pedes- 
tal, between two Corinthian columns of black 
marble, gilded at base and top. Above the 
entablature appear the armorial bearings of 
Shakespeare — a pointed spear on a bend 
sable and a silver falcon on a tasselled hel- 
met supporting a spear. Over this heraldic 
emblem is a death's-head, and on each side 
of it sits a carved cherub, one holding a 
spade, the other an inverted torch. In front 
of the effigy is a cushion, upon which both 
hands rest, holding a scroll and a pen. Be- 
neath is an inscription in Latin and English, 
supposed to have been furnished by the poet's 
son-in-law, Dr. Hall. The bust was cut by 
Gerard Jonson, a native of Amsterdam and 
by occupation a "tomb-maker," who lived 
in South wark and possibly had seen the poet. 
The material is a soft stone, and the work, 



176 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

when first set up, was painted in the colours 
of life. Its peculiarities indicate that it was 
copied from a mask of the features taken 
after death. Some persons "believe that this 
mask has since heen found, and busts of 
Shakespeare have been based upon it, by W. 
R. 0' Donovan and by William Page. In 
September, 1764, John Ward, grandfather of 
Mrs. Siddons, having come to Stratford with 
a theatrical company, gave a performance of 
Othello, in the Guildhall, and devoted its 
proceeds to reparation of the Gerard Jon- 
son effigy, then somewhat damaged by time. 
The original colours were then carefully re- 
stored and freshened. In 1793, under the 
direction of Malone, this bust, together with 
the image of John-a-Combe — a recumbent 
statue upon a tomb close to the east wall of 
the chancel — was coated with white paint. 
From that plight it was extricated, in 1861, 
by the assiduous skill of Simon Collins, who 
immersed it in a bath which took off the 
white paint and restored the colours. The 
eyes are painted light hazel, the hair and 
pointed beard auburn, the face and hands 
flesh- tint. The dress consists of a scarlet 
doublet, with a rolling collar, closely but- 
toned down the front, worn under a loose 
black gown without sleeves. The upper 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 1 77 

part of the cushion is green, the lower part 
crimson, and this object is ornamented 
with gilt tassels. The stone pen that used 
to be in the right hand of the bust was 
taken from it toward the end of the last 
century by a young Oxford student, and 
being dropped by him upon the pavement 
was broken. A quill pen has been put in 
its place. This is the inscription beneath 
the bust : — 

Ivdicio Pylivra, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, 
Terra tegit, popvlvs mseret, Olympvs liabet. 

Stay, passenger, why goest thov by so fast? 
Read, if thov canst, whom enviovs Death hath 

plast 
Within this monvment: Shakspeare: with 

whome 
Qvick Natvre elide ; whose name doth deck y 3 

tonibe 
Far more than cost ; sieth all y 4 he hath writt 
Leaves living art bvt page to serve his witt. 

Obiit Ano. Doi. 1616. ^Etatis 53. Die. 23. Ap. 

The erection of the old castles, cathedrals, 
monasteries, and churches of England was 
accomplished, little by little, with labori- 
ous toil protracted through many years. 
Stratford church, probably more than seven 
centuries old, presents a mixture of archi- 

3[ 



I78 SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

tectural styles, in which Saxon simplicity 
and Norman grace are beautifully mingled. 
Different parts of the structure were built 
at different times. It is fashioned in the 
customary crucial form, with a square tower, 
an octagon stone spire, (erected in 1764, to 
replace a more ancient one, made of oak and 
covered with lead), and a fretted battlement 
all around its roof. Its windows are diver- 
sified, but mostly Gothic. The approach to 
it is across a churchyard thickly sown with 
graves, through a lovely green avenue of 
lime-trees, leading to a porch on its north 
side. This avenue of foliage is said to be 
the copy of one that existed there in Shake- 
speare's day, through which he must often 
have walked, and through which at last he 
was carried to his grave. Time itself has 
fallen asleep in this ancient place. The 
low sob of the organ only deepens the awful 
sense of its silence and its dreamless repose. 
Yews and elms grow in the churchyard, and 
many a low tomb and many a leaning stone 
are there in the shadow, gray with moss and 
mouldering with age. Birds have built their 
nests in many crevices in the timeworn 
tower, round which at sunset you may see 
them circle, with chirp of greeting or with 
call of anxious discontent Near by flows 



SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. I 79 

the peaceful river, reflecting the gray spire 
in its dark, silent, shining waters. In the 
long and lonesome meadows beyond it the 
primroses stand in their golden ranks among 
the clover, and the frilled and fluted bell of 
the cowslip, hiding its single drop of blood 
in its bosom, closes its petals as the night 
comes down. 

Northward, at a little distance from the 
Church of the Holy Trinity, stands, on the 
west bank of the Avon, the building that 
will always be famous as the Shakespeare 
Memorial. The idea of the Memorial was 
suggested in 1864, incidentally to the cere- 
monies which then commemorated the three- 
hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. 
Ten years later the site for this structure 
was presented to the town by Charles 
Edward Flower, one of its most honoured 
inhabitants. Contributions of money were 
then asked, and were given. Americans as 
well as Englishmen contributed. On April 
23, 1877, the first stone of the Memorial 
was laid. On April 23, 1880, the building 
was dedicated. The fabric comprises a 
theatre, a library, and a picture-gallery. 
In the theatre the plays of Shakespeare are 
annually represented, in a manner as nearly 
perfect as possible. In the library and 



l8o SHAKESPEARE'S HOME. 

picture-gallery are to be assembled all the 
books upon Shakespeare that have been 
published, and all the choice paintings that 
can be obtained to illustrate his life and his 
works. As the years pass this will natur- 
ally become a principal depository of Shake- 
spearean objects. A dramatic college may 
grow up, in association with the Shakespeare 
theatre. The gardens that surround the 
Memorial will augment their loveliness in 
added expanse of foliage and in greater 
wealth of floral luxuriance. The mellow 
tinge of age will soften the bright tints of 
the red brick that mainly composes the 
building. On its cone-shaped turrets ivy 
will clamber and moss will nestle. When a 
few generations have passed, the old town 
of Stratford will have adopted this now 
youthful stranger into the race of her vener- 
ated antiquities. The same air of poetic 
mystery that rests now upon his cottage 
and his grave will diffuse itself around his 
Memorial ; and a remote posterity, looking 
back to the men and the ideas of to-day, 
will remember with grateful pride that Eng- 
lish-speaking people of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, although they could confer no honour 
upon the great name of Shakespeare, yet 
honoured themselves in consecrating this 
votive temple to his memory. 



UP TO LONDON. l8l 



XIII. 



UP TO LONDON. 

18S2. 

ABOUT the middle of the night the great 
ship comes to a pause, off the coast of 
Ireland, and, looking forth across the black 
waves and through the rifts in the rising 
mist, we see the low and lonesome verge of 
that land of trouble and misery. A beauti- 
ful white light flashes now and then from 
the shore, and at intervals the mournful 
booming of a solemn bell floats over the sea. 
Soon is heard the rolling click of oars, and 
then two or three dusky boats glide past 
the ship, and hoarse voices hail and answer. 
A few stars are visible in the hazy sky, and 
the breeze from the land brings off, in fitful 
puffs, the fragrant balm of grass and clover, 
mingled with the salt odours of sea-weed 
and slimy rocks. There is a sense of mys- 
tery over the whole wild scene; but we 
realise now that human companionship is 
near, and that the long and lonely ocean 
voyage is ended. 



1 82 UP TO LONDON. 

Travellers who make the run from Liver- 
pool to London by the Midland Railway 
pass through the vale of Derby and skirt 
around the stately Peak that Scott has com- 
memorated in his novel of Peveril. It is a 
more rugged country than is seen in the 
transit by the North- Western road, but not 
more beautiful. You see the storied moun- 
tain, in its delicacy of outline and its airy 
magnificence of poise, soaring into the sky 
— its summit almost lost in the smoky 
haze — and you wind through hillside pas- 
tures and meadow-lands that are curiously 
intersected with low, zigzag stone walls ; 
and constantly, as the scene changes, you 
catch glimpses of green lane and shining 
river ; of dense copses that cast their cool 
shadow on the moist and gleaming emerald 
sod ; of long white roads that stretch away 
like cathedral aisles and are lost beneath the 
leafy arches of elm and oak ; of little church 
towers embowered in ivy ; of thatched cot- 
tages draped with roses ; of dark ravines, 
luxuriant with a wild profusion of rocks and 
trees ; and of golden grain that softly waves 
and whispers in the summer wind ; while, 
all around, the grassy banks and glimmering 
meadows are radiant with yellow daisies, 
and with that wonderful scarlet of the 



UP TO LONDON. 1 83 

poppy that gives an almost human glow 
of life and loveliness to the whole face of 
England. After some hours of such a 
pageant — so novel, so fascinating, so fleet- 
ing, so stimulative of eager curiosity and 
poetic desire — it is a relief at last to stand 
in the populous streets and among the grim 
houses of London, with its surging tides of 
life, and its turmoil of effort, conflict, exul- 
tation, and misery. How strange it seems 
— yet, at the same time, how homelike and 
familiar ! There soars aloft the great dome 
of St. Paul's cathedral, with its golden cross 
that flashes in the sunset ! There stands 
the Victoria tower — fit emblem of the true 
royalty of the sovereign whose name it 
bears. And there, more lowly but more 
august, rise the sacred turrets of the Abbey. 
It is the same old London — the great heart 
of the modern world — the great city of our 
reverence and love. As the wanderer writes 
these words he hears the plashing of the 
fountains in Trafalgar Square and the even- 
ing chimes that peal out from the spire of 
St. Martin-in-the- Fields, and he knows him- 
self once more at the shrine of his youthful 
dreams. 

To the observant stranger in London few 
sights can be more impressive than those 



154 UP TO LONDON. 

that illustrate the singular manner in which 
the life of the present encroaches upon 
the memorials of the past. Old Temple 
Bar has gone, — a piece of sculpture, at 
the junction of Fleet Street and the Strand, 
denoting where once it stood. (It has been 
removed to Theobald's Park, near Waltham, 
and is now the lodge gate of the grounds 
of Sir Henry Meux.) The Midland Railway- 
trains dash over what was once St. Pan- 
eras churchyard — the burial-place of Mary 
Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and 
of many other British worthies — and pas- 
sengers looking from the carriages may see 
the children of the neighbourhood sporting 
among the few tombs that yet remain in 
that despoiled cemetery. Dolly's Chop- 
House, intimately associated with the wits 
of the reign of Queen Anne, has been de- 
stroyed. The ancient tavern of " The 
Cock," immortalised by Tennyson, in his 
poem of " Will Waterproof's Monologue," 
is soon to disappear, — with its singular 
wooden vestibule that existed before the 
time of the Plague and that escaped the 
great fire of 1666. On the site of North- 
umberland House stands the Grand Hotel. 
The gravestones that formerly paved the 
precinct of Westminster Abbey have been 



UP TO LONDON. 1 85 

removed, to make way for grassy lawns 
intersected with pathways. In Southwark, 
across the Thames, the engine-room of the 
brewery of Messrs. Barclay & Perkins occu- 
pies the site of the Globe Theatre, in which 
many of Shakespeare's plays were first 
produced. One of the most venerable and 
beautiful churches in London, that of St. 
Bartholomew the Great, — a gray, moulder- 
ing temple, of the twelfth century, hidden 
away in a corner of Smithfield, — is dese- 
crated by the irruption of an adjacent shop, 
the staircase hall of which breaks cruelly 
into the sacred edifice and impends above 
the altar. As lately as July 12, 1882, the 
present writer, walking in the churchyard 
of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, — the sepul- 
chre of William Wycheiiey, Robert Wilks, 
Charles Macklin, Joseph Haines, Thomas 
King, Samuel Butler, Thomas Southerne, 
Edward Shuter, Dr. Arne, Thomas Davies, 
Edward Kynaston, Richard Estcourt, Wil- 
liam Havard, and many other renowned 
votaries of literature and the stage, — found 
workmen building a new wall to sustain 
the enclosure, and almost every stone in the 
cemetery uprooted and leaning against the 
adjacent houses. Those monuments, it 
was said, would be replaced ; but it was 



1 86 UP TO LONDON. 

impossible not to consider the chances of 
error in a new mortuary deal — and the 
grim witticism of Rufus Choate, about di- 
lating with the wrong emotion, came then 
into remembrance, and did not come amiss. 
Facts such as these, however, bid us re- 
member that even the relics of the past are 
passing away, and that cities, unlike human 
creatures, may grow to be so old that at last 
they will become new. It is not wonderful 
that London should change its aspect from 
one decade to another, as the living sur- 
mount and obliterate the dead. Thomas 
Sutton's Charter- House School, founded in 
1G11, when Shakespeare and Ben Jonson 
were still writing, was reared upon ground 
in which several thousand corses were 
buried, during the time of the Indian pes- 
tilence of 1348 ; and it still stands and 
nourishes — though not as vigorously now 
as might be wished. Nine thousand new 
houses, it is said, are built in the great 
capital every year, and twenty-eight miles 
of new street are thus added to it. On a 
Sunday I drove for three hours through the 
eastern part of London without coming 
upon a single trace of the open fields. On 
the west, all the region from Kensington to 
Richmond is settled for most part of the 



UP TO LONDON. 1 87 

way ; while northward the city is stretching 
its arms toward Hampstead, Highgate, and 
tranquil and blooming Finchley. Truly 
the spirit of this age is in strong contrast 
with that of the time of Henry the Eighth 
when (1580), to prevent the increasing size 
of London, all new buildings were forbidden 
to be erected 4 ' where no former hath been 
known to have been." The march of im- 
provement nowadays carries everything be- 
fore it : even British conservatism is at 
some points giving way : and, noting the 
changes that have occurred here within 
only five years, I am persuaded that those 
who would see what remains of the London 
of which they have read and dreamed — 
the London of Dryden and Pope, of Addi- 
son, Sheridan, and Byron, of Betterton, 
Garrick, and Edmund Kean — will, as time 
passes, find more and more difficulty both 
in tracing the footsteps of fame, and in 
finding that sympathetic, reverent spirit 
which hallows the relics of genius and re- 



OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 



XIV. 
OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 

SIGHT-SEEING, merely for its own sake, 
is not to be commended. Hundreds of 
persons roam through the storied places of 
England, carrying nothing away but the 
bare sense of travel. It is not the spectacle 
that benefits, but the meaning of the spec- 
tacle. In the great temples of religion, in 
those wonderful cathedrals that are the 
glory of the old world, we ought to feel, not 
merely the physical beauty but the perfect, 
illimitable faith, the passionate, incessant 
devotion, which alone made them possible. 
The cold intellect of a sceptical age, like the 
present, could never create such a majestic 
cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till 
the pilgrim feels this truth has he really 
learned the lesson of such places, — to keep 
alive in his heart the capacity of self-sacri- 
fice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and 
beauty of the spiritual life. At the tombs of 
great men we ought to feel something more 



OLD CnUKCHES OF LONDON. 1 89 

than a consciousness of the crumbling clay 
that moulders within, — something more 
even than knowledge of their memorable 
words and deeds : we ought, as we ponder 
on the certainty of death and the evanes- 
cence of earthly things, to realise that Art 
at least is permanent, and that no creature 
can be better employed than in noble effort 
to make the soul worthy of immortality. 
The relics of the past, contemplated merely 
because they are relics, are nothing. You 
tire, in this old land, of the endless array 
of ruined castles and of wasting graves ; 
you sicken at the thought of the mortality 
of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, 
and you long to look again on roses and the 
face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. 
But not if the meaning of the past is truly 
within your sympathy ; not if you per- 
ceive its associations as feeling equally with 
knowledge ; not if you truly know that its 
lessons are not of death but of life ! To-day 
builds over the ruins of yesterday, as well 
in the soul of man as on the vanishing cities 
that mark his course. There need be no 
regret that the present should, in this sense, 
obliterate the past. 

Much, however, as London has changed, 
and constantly as it continues to change, 



190 OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 

there still remain, and long will continue to 
remain, many objects that startle and im- 
press the sensitive mind. Through all its 
wide compass, by night and day, there flows 
and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of 
activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacu- 
ous persons, sordid, ignorant, and common- 
place, tramp to and fro amid its storied 
antiquities, heedless of their existence. 
Through such surroundings, but finding 
here and there a sympathetic guide or a 
friendly suggestion, the explorer must make 
his way, — lonely in the crowd, and walk- 
ing like one who lives in a dream. Yet he 
never will drift in vain through a city like 
this. I went one night into the cloisters 
of Westminster Abbey — that part, the 
South Walk, which is still accessible after 
the gates have been closed. The stars 
shone down upon the blackening walls and 
glimmering windows of the great cathedral ; 
the grim, mysterious arches were dimly 
lighted ; the stony pathways, stretching 
away beneath the venerable building, 
seemed to lose themselves in caverns of 
darkness ; not a sound was heard but the 
faint rustling of the grass upon the cloister 
green. Every stone there is the mark of a 
sepulchre ; every breath of the night wind 



OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. I9I 

seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. 
There, among the crowded graves, rest 
Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle, — in 
Queen Anne's reign such brilliant lumi- 
naries of the stage, — and there was buried 
the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, 
once manager of Drury Lane, who wrote 
The Fair Inconstant for Barton Booth, and 
some notably felicitous love-songs. There, 
too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne 
(Mrs. Theo. Gibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas 
Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting 
upon the narrow ledge that was the 
monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, 
the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my 
feet was the great stone that covers twenty- 
six monks of Westminster who perished by 
the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. 
It would scarcely be believed that the doors 
of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot ; 
that ladies may sometimes be seen tending 
flowers upon the ledges that roof these 
cloister walks. Yet so it is ; and in such a 
place, at such a time, you comprehend bet- 
ter than before the self-centred, serious, 
ruminant, romantic character of the English 
mind, — which loves, more than anything 
else in the world, the privacy of august 
and a sombre and stately 



192 OLD CHURCHES OP LONDON. 

solitude. It hardly need be said that you 
likewise obtain here a striking sense of the 
power of contrast. I was again aware of 
this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light 
in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered 
that old temple and found the men of the 
choir at their rehearsal, and presently 
observed on the wall a brass plate which 
announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was 
buried here, in the chancel, — after being 
decapitated for high treason in the Palace 
Yard outside. Such things are the sur- 
prises of this historic capital. This inscrip- 
tion begs the reader to remember Raleigh's 
virtues as well as his faults, — a plea, sure- 
ly, that every man might well wish should 
be made for himself at last. I thought of 
the verses that the old warrior-poet is said 
to have left in his Bible, when they led him 
out to die — 

" Even such is time ; that takes in trust 

Our youth, our joys, our all we have, 
And pays us nought but age and dust; 

Which, in the dark and silent grave, 
When we have wandered all our ways, 

Shuts up the story of our clays. — 
But from this earth, this grave, this dust, 

My God shall raise me up, I trust." 

This church contains a window commemo- 



OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 1 93 

rative of Raleigh, presented by Americans, 
and inscribed with these lines, by Lowell — 

" The New World's sons, from England's breast 

we drew 

Such milk as bids remember whence we came; 

Proud of her past, wheref rom our future grew, 

This window we inscribe with Raleigh's 

name." 

It also contains a window commemora- 
tive of Caxton, presented by the printers 
and publishers of London, which is inscribed 
with these lines by Tennyson — 

"Thy prayer was Light — more Light — while 

Time shall last. 

Thou sawest a glory growing on the night, 

But not the shadows which that light would 

cast 

Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light." 

In St. Margaret's — a storied haunt, for 
shining names alike of nobles and poets — 
was also buried John Skelton, another of 
the old bards (obiit 1529), the enemy and 
satirist of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas 
More, one of whom he described as " madde 
Amaleke," and the other as "dawcock 
doctor." Their renown has managed to 
survive those terrific shafts; but at least 
this was a falcon who flew at eagles. Here 

N 



194 OLr> CHURCHES OF LONDON. 

the poet Campbell was married, — October 
11, 1803. Such old churches as this — 
guarding so well their treasures of history — 
are, in a special sense, the traveller's bless- 
ings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the jani- 
tor is a woman ; and she will point out to 
you the lettered stone that formerly marked 
the grave of Milton. It is in the nave, but 
it has been moved to a place about twelve 
feet from its original position, — the remains 
of the illustrious poet being, in fact, beneath 
the floor of a pew, on the left of the central 
aisle, about the middle of the church : albeit 
there is a story, possibly true, that, on an 
occasion when this church was repaired, in 
August, 1790, the coffin of Milton suffered 
profanation, and his bones were dispersed. 
Among the monuments hard by is a fine 
marble bust of Milton, placed against the 
wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its 
value, that George the Third came here to 
see it. 1 Several of the neighbouring inscrip- 
tions are of astonishing quaintness. The 
adjacent churchyard — a queer, irregular, 

1 This memorial bears the following inscription : 
" John Milton. Author of ' Paradise Lost.' Born, 
December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father, 
John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both 
interred in this church." 



OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 1 95 

sequestered, lonesome bit of grassy ground, 
teeming with monuments, and hemmed in 
with houses, terminates, at one end, in a 
piece of the old Roman wall of London 
(a. i). 306), — an adamantine structure of 
cemented flints — which has lasted from the 
days of Constantine, and which bids fair to 
last forever. I shall always remember that 
strange nook with the golden light of a sum- 
mer morning shining upon it, the birds 
twittering among its graves, and all around 
it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest 
as made it seem, though in the heart of the 
great city, a thousand miles from any haunt 
of man. (It was formally opened as a gar- 
den for public recreation on July 8, 1891.) 

St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and 
venerable temple, the church of the priory 
of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thir- 
teenth century, is full of relics of the history 
of England. The priory, which adjoined 
this church, has long since disappeared and 
portions of the building have been restored ; 
but the noble Gothic columns and the com- 
memorative sculpture remain unchanged. 
Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, 
who built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas 
Gresham, who founded both Gresham Col- 
lege and the Royal Exchange in London, 



I96 OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 

and Sir William Pickering, once Queen 
Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of 
the amorous aspirants for her royal hand ; 
and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the 
veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke 
of Gloster received absolution, after the 
disappearance of the princes in the Tower. 
Standing at that altar, in the cool silence 
of the lonely church and the waning light 
of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his 
slender, misshapen form, decked in the rich 
apparel that he loved, his handsome, aqui- 
line, thoughtful face, the drooping head, 
the glittering eyes, the nervous hand that 
toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy 
stillness of his person, from head to foot, 
as he knelt there before the priest and 
mocked himself and heaven with the form of 
prayer. Every place that Richard touched 
is haunted by his magnetic presence. In 
another part of the church you are shown 
the tomb of a person whose will provided 
that the key of his sepulchre should be 
placed beside his body, and that the door 
should be opened once a year, for a hundred 
years. It seems to have been his expecta- 
tion to awake and arise ; but the allotted 
century has passed and his bones are still 
quiescent. 



OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 1 97 

How calmly they sleep — those warriors 
who once filled the world with the tumult 
of their deeds ! If you go into St. Mary's, 
in the Temple, you will stand above the 
dust of the Crusaders and mark the beau- 
tiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on 
the marble pavement, and feel and know, 
as perhaps you never did before, the calm 
that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was 
built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It 
would be difficult to find a lovelier speci- 
men of Norman architecture — at once 
massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet 
rich with beauty, in every line and scroll. 
There is only one other church in Great 
Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a 
circular vestibule. The stained glass win- 
dows, both here and at St. Helen's, are 
very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's 
was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infa- 
mous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim 
who pauses to muse at the grave of Gold- 
smith may often hear its solemn, mournful 
tones. I heard them thus, and was think- 
ing of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when 
he first learned that Goldsmith was dead : 
"Poor Goldy was wild — very wild — but 
he is so no more." The room in which he 
died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, 



I98 OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON. 

was but a little way from the spot where he 
sleeps. 1 The noises of Fleet Street are 
heard there only as a distant murmur. But 
birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter 
down upon his tomb, and every breeze that 
sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient 
Temple breathes out his requiem. 

1 No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple. —In 1757-58 
Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish 
Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the 
Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was 
living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck 
Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet 
Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. After- 
wards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Isling- 
ton, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the 
Inner Temple. 



LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 1 99 



XV. 

LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 

THE mind that can reverence historic 
associations needs no explanation of 
the charm that such associations possess. 
There are streets and houses in London 
which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted 
with memories and hallowed with an imper- 
ishable light — that not even the dreary 
commonness of everyday life can quench or 
dim. Almost every great author in English 
literature has here left behind him some 
personal trace, some relic that brings us at 
once into his living presence. In the time 
of Shakespeare, — of whom it may be noted 
that wherever you find him at all you find 
him in select and elegant neighbourhoods, 
— Aldersgate was a secluded and peaceful 
quarter of the town ; and there the poet had 
his residence, convenient to the theatre in 
Blackfriars, in which he is known to have 
owned a share. It is said that he dwelt 
at number 134 Aldersgate Street (the 



200 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 

house was long ago demolished), and in 
that region, — amid all the din of traffic 
and all the strange adjuncts of a new 
age, — those who love him are in his 
company. Milton was born in a court 
adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and 
the explorer comes upon him as a resident 
in St. Bride's churchyard, — where the poet 
Lovelace was buried, — and at the house 
which is now No. 19 York Street, West- 
minster (in later times occupied by Bentham 
and by Hazlitt), and in Jewin Street, 
Aldersgate. When secretary to Cromwell 
he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the 
headquarters of the London police. His 
last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill 
Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it 
covered by the Artillery barracks. Walk- 
ing through King Street, Westminster, you 
will not forget Edmund Spenser, who died 
there, in grief and destitution, a victim to 
the same inhuman spirit of Irish ruffian- 
ism that is still disgracing humanity and 
troubling the peace of the world. Every- 
body remembers Ben Jonson's terse record 
of that calamity : ' ' The Irish having robbed 
Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a 
little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, 
and after he died, for lack of bread, in King 



LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 201 

Street." Jonson himself is closely and 
charmingly associated with places that may 
still he seen. He passed his boyhood near 
Charing Cross — having been born in Harts- 
horn Lane, now Northumberland Street — 
and went to the parish school of St. Martin- 
in-the-Fields ; and those who roam around 
Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this 
great poet helped to build it — a trowel in 
one hand and Horace in the other. His 
residence, in his days of fame, was just 
outside of Temple Bar — but all that neigh- 
bourhood is new at the present day. 

The Mermaid, which he frequented — 
with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chap- 
man, and Donne — was in Bread Street, 
but no trace of it remains ; and a banking- 
house stands now on the site of the Devil 
Tavern, in Fleet Street, where the Apollo 
Club, which he founded, used to meet. The 
famous inscription, " O rare Ben Jonson," 
is three times cut in the Abbey — once in 
Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle 
where he was buried, the smaller of the 
two slabs marking the place of his vertical 
grave. Dryden once dwelt in a narrow, 
dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane, — the 
street in which Dean Swift has placed the 
home of Gulliver, and where now the famous 



202 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 

Doomsday Book is kept, — but later he re- 
moved to a finer dwelling, in Gerrard 
Street, Soho, which was the scene of his 
death. Both buildings are marked with 
mural tablets and neither of them seems to 
have undergone much change. (The house 
in Fetter Lane is gone — 1891.) Edmund 
Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a 
beer-shop ; but his memory hallows the place, 
and an inscription upon it proudly announces 
that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house in 
Gough Square bears likewise a mural tab- 
let, and, standing at its time-worn thresh- 
old, the visitor needs no effort of fancy 
to picture that uncouth figure shambling 
through the crooked lanes that lead into 
this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In 
this house he wrote the first Dictionary 
of the English language and the immortal 
letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gough 
Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, drama- 
tist, author of The School of Wives and 
The Man of Reason, and one of the friends 
of Goldsmith, at whose burial he was pres- 
ent. The historical antiquarian society 
that has marked many of the literary 
shrines of London has rendered a great 
service. The houses associated with Rey- 
nolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, 



LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 203 

Byron, in Holies Street, Benjamin Frank- 
lin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street, 
Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's, 
Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael 
Farraday, in Blandford Street, and Mrs. 
Siddons, in Baker Street, are but a few of 
the historic spots which are thus commem- 
orated. Much, however, remains to be 
done. One would like to know, for in- 
stance, in which room in "The Albany" 
it was that Byron wrote Lara, 1 in which of 
the houses in Buckingham Street Coleridge 
had his lodging while he was translating 
WaUenstein ; whereabouts in Bloomsbury 
Square was the residence of Akenside, who 

1 Byron was born at No. 24 Holies Street, Caven- 
dish Square. While he was at school in Dulwich 
Grove his mothf r lived in a house in Sloane Terrace. 
Other houses associated with him are No. S St. 
James Street; a lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 
"The Albany" — a lodging that he rented of Lord 
Althorpe, and moved into on March 28th, 181-t; and 
No. 139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, was 
born, and where Lady Byron left him. This, at 
present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir Alger- 
non Borthwick (18S5). John Murray's house, where 
Byron's fragment of Autobiography was burned, is 
etill on the same spot in Albemarle Street. Byron's 
body, when brought home from Greece, lay in state 
at No. 25 Great George Street, Westminster, before 
being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in 
Nottinghamshire, for burial. 



204 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 

wrote The Pleasures of Imagination, and 
of Croly, who wrote Salathiel ; or where it 
was that Gray lived, when he established 
himself close by Russell Square, in order to 
be one of the first — as he continued to be 
one of the most constant — students at the 
then newly opened British Museum (1759). 
These, and such as these, may seem trivial 
thing's ; but Nature has denied an unfailing 
source of innocent happiness to the man 
who can find no pleasure in them. For my 
part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a 
special delight to remember even so slight 
an incident as that recorded of the author 
of the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," 
— that he once saw there his satirist, Dr. 
Johnson, rolling and puffing along the side- 
walk, and cried out to a friend, " Here 
comes Ursa Major. 1 ' For the true lovers 
of literature "Ursa Major" walks oftener 
in Fleet Street to-day than any living man. 
A good thread of literary research might 
be profitably followed by him who should 
trace the footsteps of all the poets that 
have held, in England, the office of laureate. 
John Kay was laureate in the reign of Ed- 
ward IV. ; Andrew Bernard in that of 
Henry VII. ; John Skelton in that of Henry 
VIII. ; and Edmund Spenser in that of 



LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 205 

Elizabeth. Since then the succession has 
included the names of Samuel Daniel, 
Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William 
Davenant, John Dryclen, Thomas Shadwell, 
Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence 
Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, 
Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Rob- 
ert Southey, William Wordsworth, and 
Alfred Tennyson — the latter still wearing, 
in spotless renown, that 

" Laurel greener from the brows 
Of him that uttered uothiug base." 

Most of those bards were intimately asso- 
ciated with London, and several of them 
are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, be- 
cause so many storied names are written 
upon gravestones that the explorer of the 
old churches of London finds so rich a har- 
vest of impressive association and lofty 
thought. Few persons visit them, and you 
are likely to find yourself comparatively 
alone in rambles of this kind. I went one 
morning into St. Martin — once ' ' in the 
fields," now in one of the busiest thorough- 
fares at the centre of the city — and found 
there only a pew-opener preparing for the 
service, and an organist playing an anthem. 
It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful 



206 LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 

spire and its columns of weather-beaten 
stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty 
black, and it is almost as famous for theat- 
rical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, 
or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement 
Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, 
was buried the bewitching and large-hearted 
Nell Gwyn ; here is the grave of James 
Smith, joint author with his brother Hor- 
ace — who was buried at Tunbridge Wells 
— of The Rejected Addresses; here rests 
Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface ; and 
here were laid the ashes of the romantic 
and brilliant Mrs. Centlivre, and of George 
Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, 
patient labour, nor sterling achievement 
could save from a life of misfortune and an 
untimely and piteous death. A cheerier 
association of this church is with Thomas 
Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here 
married. At St. Giles' s-in-the-Fields, again, 
are the graves of George Chapman, who 
translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who 
wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Kich, the 
manager, who brought out Gay's Beggars' 1 
Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old 
dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet 
has been so often murmured in such solemn 
haunts as these — 



LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON. 207 

" Only the actions of the just 
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." 

Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was 
writing his plays, and he was fortunate in 
the favour of Queen Henrietta Maria, wife 
to Charles the First ; but when the Puritan 
times came in he fell into misfortune and 
poverty and became a school-teacher in 
Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or 
near Fleet Street, and his home was one 
of the many dwellings that were destroyed 
in the great fire. Then he fled, with his 
wife, into the parish of St. Giles' s-in-the- 
Fields, where, overcome with grief and 
terror, they both died, within twenty-four 
hours of each other, and were buried in the 
same grave. 



208 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 



XVI. 

A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 

TO muse over the dust of those about 
whom we have read so much — the 
great actors, thinkers, and writers, the 
warriors and statesmen for whom the play 
is ended and the lights are put out — is to 
come very near to them, and to realise more 
deeply than ever before their close relation- 
ship with our own humanity; and we ought 
to be wiser and better for this experience. 
It is good, also, to seek out the favourite 
haunts of our heroes, and call them up as 
they were in their lives. One of the hap- 
piest accidents of a London stroll was the 
finding of the Harp Tavern, 1 in Russell 
Street, Covent Garden, near the stage door 

1 An account of the " Harp " in the Victuallers* 
Gazette says that this tavern has had within its doors 
every actor of note since the days of Garrick, and 
many actresses, also, of the period of eighty or a 
hundred years ago; and it mentions as visitants here 
Dora Jordan, Nance Oldfield, Anne Bracegirdle, 



A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 20Q. 

of Drary Lane Theatre, which was the ac- 
customed resort of Edmund Kean. Car- 
penters and masons were at work upon it 
when I entered, and it was necessary almost 
to creep amid heaps of broken mortar and 
rubbish beneath their scaffolds, in order to 
reach the interior rooms. Here, at the end 
of a narrow passage, was a little apartment, 
perhaps fifteen feet square, with a low ceil- 
ing and a bare floor, in which Kean habitu- 
ally took his pleasure, in the society of 
fellow-actors and boon companions, long 
ago. A narrow, cushioned bench against 
the walls, a few small tables, a chair or 
two, a number of churchwarden pipes on 
the mantlepiece, and portraits of Disraeli 
and Gladstone, constituted the furniture. 
A panelled wainscot and dingy red paper 
covered the walls, and a few cobwebs hung 
from the grimy ceiling. By this time the 
old room has been made neat and comely; 
but then it bore the marks of hard usage 
and long neglect, and it seemed all the more 
interesting for that reason. 

Kean's seat is at the right, as you enter, 
and just above it a mural tablet designates 

Kitty Clive, Harriet Mellon, Barton Booth, Quin, 
Cibber, Macklin, Grimaldi, Mine. Vestris, and Miss 
Stephens — who became Countess of Essex. 
O 



2IO A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 

the spot, — which is still further commemo- 
rated by a death-mask of the actor, placed 
on a little shelf of dark wood and covered 
with glass. No better portrait could be de- 
sired; certainly no better one exists. In 
life this must have been a glorious face. 
The eyes are large and prominent, the brow 
is broad and fine, the mouth wide and 
obviously sensitive, the chin delicate, and 
the nose long, well set, and indicative of 
immense force of character. The whole 
expression of the face is that of refinement 
and of great and desolate sadness. Kean, 
as is known from the testimony of one who 
acted with him, 1 was always at his best in 
passages of pathos. To hear him speak 
Othello's farewell was to hear the perfect 
music of heart-broken despair. To see him 
when, as The Stranger, he listened to the 
song, was to see the genuine, absolute 
reality of hopeless sorrow. He could, of 

1 The mother of Jefferson, the comedian, described 
Edmund Kean in this way. She was a member of 
the company at the Walnut Street Theatre, Phila- 
delphia, when he acted there, and it was she who 
eang for him the well-known lines — 
" I have a silent sorrow here, 
A grief I '11 ne'er impart; 
It breathes no sigh, it sheds no tear, 
But it consumes my heart." 



A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 211 

course, thrill his hearers in the ferocious 
outbursts of Richard and Sir Giles, but it 
was in tenderness and grief that he was 
supremely great ; and no one will wonder 
at that who looks upon his noble face — so 
eloquent of self-conflict and suffering — even 
in this cold and colourless mask of death. 
It is easy to judge and condemn the sins of 
a weak, passionate humanity; but when we 
think of such creatures of genius as Edmund 
Kean and Robert Burns, we ought to con- 
sider what demons in their own souls those 
wretched men were forced to fight, and by 
what agonies they expiated their vices and 
errors. This little tavern-room tells the 
whole mournful story, with death to point 
the moral, and pity to breathe its sigh of 
unavailing regret. 

Many of the present frequenters of the 
Harp are elderly men, whose conversation 
is enriched with memories of the stage and 
with ample knowledge and judicious taste 
hi literature and art. They naturally speak 
with pride of Kean's association with their 
favourite resort. Often in that room the 
eccentric genius has put himself in pawn, 
to exact from the manager of Drury Lane 
theatre the money needed to relieve the 
wants of some brother actor. Often his 



212 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 

voice lias been heard there, in the songs 
that he sang with so much feeling and 
sweetness and such homely yet beautiful 
skill. In the circles of the learned and 
courtly he never was really at home ; but 
here he filled the throne and ruled the king- 
dom of the revel, and here no doubt every 
mood of his mind, from high thought and 
generous emotion to misanthropical bitter- 
ness and vacant levity, found its unfettered 
expression. They show you a broken panel 
in the high wainscot, which was struck and 
smashed by a pewter pot that he hurled at 
the head of a person who had given him 
offence ; and they tell you at the same time, 
— as, indeed, is historically true, — that he 
was the idol of his comrades, the first in 
love, pity, sympathy, and kindness, and 
would turn his back, any day, for the least 
of them, on the nobles who sought his com- 
panionship. There is no better place than 
this in which to study the life of Edmund 
Kean. Old men have been met with here who 
saw him on the stage, and even acted with 
him. The room is the weekly meeting-place 
and habitual nightly tryst of an ancient 
club, called the City of Lushington, which 
has existed since the days of the Regency, 
and of which these persons are members. 



A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 21 3 

The City lias its Mayor, Sheriff, insignia, 
record-book, and system of ceremonials ; 
and much of wit, wisdom, and song may 
be enjoyed at its civic feasts. The names 
of its four wards — Lunacy, Suicide, Pov- 
erty, and Juniper — are written up in the 
four corners of the room, and whoever joins 
must select his ward. Sheridan was a 
member of it, and so was the Kegent ; and 
the present landlord of the Harp (Mr. 
M'Pherson) preserves among his relics the 
chairs in which those gay companions sat, 
when the author presided over the initiation 
of the prince. It is thought that this club 
originated out of the society of "The 
Wolves," which was formed by Kean's 
adherents, when the elder Booth arose to 
disturb his supremacy upon the stage. But 
there is no malice in it now. Its purposes 
are simply convivial and literary, and its 
tone is that of thorough good-will. 1 

One of the gentlest and most winning 
traits in the English character is its instinct 
of companionship as to literature and art. 
Since the days of the Mermaid the authors 
and actors of London have dearly loved and 

1 A coloured print of this room may be found in 
that eccentric book The Life of an Actor, by Pierce 
Egan: 1825. 



214 A HAUNT OF EDMUND KEAN. 

deeply enjoyed such odd little fraternities 
of wit as are typified, not inaptly, by the 
City of Lushington. There are no rosier 
hours in my memory than those that were 
passed, between midnight and morning, in 
the cosy clubs in London. And when dark 
days come, and foes harass, and the trou- 
bles of life annoy, it will be sweet to think 
that in still another sacred retreat of friend- 
ship, across the sea, the old armour is gleam- 
ing in the festal lights, where one of the 
gentlest spirits that ever wore the laurel of 
England's love smiles kindly on his com- 
rades and seems to murmur the charm of 
English hospitality — 

" Let no one take beyond this threshold.hence 
Words uttered here in friendship's confi- 
dence." 



STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 215 



XVII. 
STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 

IT is a cool afternoon in July, and the 
shadows are falling eastward on fields 
of waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet. 
Overhead a few light clouds are drifting, 
and the green boughs of the great elms are 
gently stirred by a breeze from the west. 
Across one of the more distant fields a flock 
of sable rooks — some of them fluttering and 
cawing — wings its slow and melancholy 
flight. There is the sound of the whetting 
of a scythe, and, near by, the twittering of 
many birds upon a cottage roof. On either 
side of the country road, which runs like a 
white rivulet through banks of green, the 
hawthorn hedges are shining and the bright 
sod is spangled with all the wild-flowers of 
an English summer. An odour of lime-trees 
and of new-mown hay sweetens the air for 
miles and miles around. Far off, on the 
horizon's verge, just glimmering through 
the haze, rises the imperial citadel of Wind- 



21 6 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 

sor. And close at hand a little child points 
to a gray spire peering out of a nest of 
ivy, and tells me that this is Stoke-Pogis 
church. 

If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth 
its dwelling-place is here. You come into 
this little churchyard by a pathway across 
the park and through a wooden turnstile ; 
and in one moment the whole world is left 
behind and forgotten. Here are the nod- 
ding elms ; here is the yew-tree's shade ; 
here ' ' heaves the turf in many a moulder- 
ing heap." All these graves seem very old. 
The long grass waves over them, and some 
of the low stones that mark them are en- 
tirely shrouded with ivy. Many of the 
' ' frail memorials ' ' are made of wood. None 
of them is neglected or forlorn, but all of 
them seem to have been scattered here, in 
that sweet disorder which is the perfection 
of rural loveliness. There never, of course, 
could have been any thought of creating 
this effect ; yet here it remains, to win your 
heart forever. And here, amid this mourn- 
ful beauty, the little church itself nestles 
close to the ground, while every tree that 
waves its branches around it, and every 
vine that clambers on its surface, seems to 
clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks 



STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 21 7 

the silence but the sighing of the wind in 
the great yew-tree at the church door, — 
beneath which was the poet's favourite seat, 
and where the brown needles, falling, 
through many an autumn, have made a 
dense carpet on the turf. Now and then 
there is a faint rustle in the ivy ; a fitful 
bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness ; 
and from a rose-tree near at hand a few 
leaves flutter down, in soundless benedic- 
tion on the dust beneath. 

Gray was laid in the same grave with his 
mother, ' i the careful, tender mother of 
many children, one alone of whom," as he 
wrote upon her gravestone, "had the mis- 
fortune to survive her." Their tomb — a 
low, oblong, brick structure, covered with 
a large slab — stands a few feet away from 
the church wall, upon which is a small tab- 
let to denote its place. The poet's name has 
not been inscribed above him. There was 
no need here of "storied urn or animated 
bust." The place is his monument, and the 
majestic Elegy — giving to the soul of the 
place a form of seraphic beauty and a voice 
of celestial music — is his immortal epitaph. 

" There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year, 
By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets 
found ; 



21 8 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 

The Redbreast loves to build & warble there, 
And little Footsteps lightly print the 
ground." 

There is a monument to Gray in Stoke 
Park, about two hundred yards from the 
church ; but it seems commemorative of the 
builder rather than the poet. They intend 
to set a memorial window in the church, to 
honour him, and the visitor finds there a 
money-box for the reception of contribu- 
tions in aid of this pious design. Nothing 
will be done amiss that serves to direct 
closer attention to his life. It was one of 
the best lives ever recorded in the history 
of literature. It was a life singularly pure, 
noble, and beautiful. In two qualities, 
sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary 
almost beyond a parallel; and those are 
qualities that literary character in the 
present day has great need to acquire. 
Gray was averse to publicity. He did not 
sway by the censure of other men ; neither 
did he need their admiration as his breath 
of life. Poetry, to him, was a great art, 
and he added nothing to literature until he 
had first made it as nearly perfect as it 
could be made by the thoughtful, laborious 
exertion of his best powers, superadded to 
the spontaneous impulse and flow of his 



STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 21 9 

genius. More voluminous writers, Charles 
Dickens among the rest, have sneered at 
him because he wrote so little. The most 
colossal form of human complacency is that 
of the individual who thinks all other crea- 
tures inferior who happen to be unlike him- 
self. This reticence on the part of Gray 
was, in fact, the emblem of his sincerity 
and the compelling cause of his imperish- 
able renown. There is a better thing than 
the great man who is always speaking ; and 
that is the great man who only speaks when 
he has a great word to say. Gray has left 
only a few poems ; but of his principal 
works each is perfect in its kind, supreme 
and unapproachable. He did not test merit 
by reference to ill-formed and capricious 
public opinion, but he wrought according 
to the highest standards of art that learning 
and taste could furnish. His letters form 
an English classic. There is no purer prose 
in existence ; there is not much that is so 
pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's 
nature, the element that makes it so im- 
pressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim 
to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was 
the self -poised, sincere, and lovely exalta- 
tion of its contemplative spirit. He was a 
man whose conduct of life would, first of 



220 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 

all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple 
of his own soul, out of which should after- 
ward flow, in their own free way, those 
choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and 
exalt the human race. He lived before he 
wrote. The soul of the Elegy is the soul 
of the man. It was his thought — which he 
has somewhere expressed in better words 
than these — that human beings are only at 
their best while such feelings endure as are 
engendered when death has just taken from 
us the objects of our love. That was the 
point of view from which he habitually 
looked upon the world ; and no man who 
has learned the lessons of experience can 
doubt that he was right. 

Gray was twenty-six years old when he 
wrote the first draft of the Elegy. He began 
that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he 
finished and published it in 1751. No visitor 
to this churchyard can miss either its inspi- 
ration or its imagery. The poet has been 
dead more than a hundred years, but the 
scene of his rambles and reveries has suf- 
fered no material change. One of his yew- 
trees, indeed, much weakened with age, 
was some time since blown down in a storm, 
and its fragments have been carried away. 
The picturesque manor house not far dis- 



STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 221 

tant was once the home of Admiral Penn, 
father of William Penn the famous Quaker. 1 
All the trees of the region have, of course, 
waxed and expanded, — not forgetting the 
neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among 
which he loved to wander, and where he 
might often have been found, sitting with 
his book, at some gnarled wreath of ' ' old 
fantastic roots." But in its general charac- 
teristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful 
beauty, this "glimmering landscape," im- 
mortalised in his verse, is the same on which 
his living eyes have looked. There was no 
need to seek for him in any special spot. 
The house in which he once lived might, no 

1 "William Penn and his children are buried in a 
little Quaker graveyard, not many miles away. The 
visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a visit to Up- 
ton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope 
lived at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Wind- 
sor Forest. Upton claims to have had a share in 
the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was 
unquestionably his place of residence when he 
wrote it. Langley Marish ought to be visited also, 
and Horton — where Milton wrote " L'Allegro," 
" II Penseroso," and " Comus." Chalfont St. Peter 
is accessible, where still is standing the house in 
which Milton finished " Paradise Lost " and began 
" Paradise Regained " ; and from there a 6hort drive 
Avill take you to Beaconsfield where you may see 
Edmund Burke's tablet in the church and the monu- 
ment to "Waller in the churchyard. 



222 STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 

doubt, be discovered ; but every nook and 
vista, every green lane and upland lawn and 
ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude 
is haunted with his presence. 

The night is coming on and the picture 
will soon be dark ; but never while mem- 
ory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What 
a blessing would be ours, if only we could 
hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, 
that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure 
freedom from all the passions of nature 
and all the cares of life, which comes upon 
us in such a place as this ! Alas, and again 
alas ! Even with the thought this golden 
mood begins to melt away; even with the 
thought comes our dismissal from its influ- 
ence. Nor will it avail us anything now to 
linger at the shrine. Fortunate is he, though 
in bereavement and regret, who parts from 
beauty while yet her kiss is warm upon his 
lips, — waiting not for the last farewell word, 
hearing not the last notes of the music, see- 
ing not the last gleams of sunset as the 
light dies from the sky. It was a sad part- 
ing, but the memory of the place can never 
now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I 
write these words I stand again in the cool 
and dusky silence of the poet's church, with 
its air of stately age and its fragrance of 



STOKE-POGIS AND THOMAS GRAY. 223 

cleanliness, while the light of the western 
sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, 
streams through the painted windows and 
softly falls upon the quaint little galleries 
and decorous pews ; and, looking forth 
through the low, arched door, I see the 
dark and melancholy boughs of the dream- 
ing yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of rip- 
pling leaves in the clear sunshine of the 
churchway path. And all the time a gentle 
voice is whispering, in the chambers of 
thought — 

" No farther seek his merits to disclose, 

Or draw his frailties from their dread 
abode : 
(There they alike in trembling hope repose) , 
The bosom of his Father and his God." 



224 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 



XVIII. 

AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 

AMONG the many deep-thoughted, melo- 
dious, and eloquent poems of Words- 
worth there is one — about the burial of 
Ossian — that glances at the question of 
fitness in a place of sepulchre. Not always, 
for the illustrious dead, has the final couch 
of rest been rightly chosen. We think with 
resignation, and with a kind of pride, of 
Keats and Shelley in the little Protestant 
burial-ground at Rome. Every heart is 
touched at the spectacle of Garrick and 
Johnson sleeping side by side in Westmin- 
ster Abbey. It was right that the dust of 
Dean Stanley should mingle with the dust 
of poets and of kings ; and to see — as the 
present writer did, only a little while ago 
— fresh flowers on the stone that covers 
him, in the chapel of Henry the Seventh, 
was to feel a tender gladness and solemn 
content. Shakespeare's grave, in the chan- 
cel of Stratford church, awakens the same 



AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 225 

ennobling awe and melancholy pleasure ; 
and it is with kindred feeling that you 
linger at the tomb of Gray. But who can 
be content that poor Letitia Landon should 
sleep beneath the pavement of a barrack, 
with soldiers trampling over her dust ? One 
might almost think, sometimes, that the 
spirit of calamity, which follows certain 
persons throughout the whole of life, had 
pursued them even in death, to haunt about 
their repose and to mar all the gentleness 
of association that ought to hallow it. Chat- 
terton, a pauper and a suicide, was huddled 
into a workhouse graveyard, the very place 
of which -r- in Shoe Lane, covered now by 
Farringdon Market — has disappeared. Ot- 
way, miserable in his love for Elizabeth 
Barry, the actress, and said to have starved 
to death in the Minories, near the Tower of 
London, was laid in a vault of St. Clement 
Danes in the middle of the Strand, where 
never the green leaves rustle, but where 
the roar of the mighty city pours on in con- 
tinual tumult. That church holds also the 
remains of William Mountfort, the actor, 
slain in a brawl by Lord Mohun ; of Nat 
Lee, ' ' the mad poet ' ' ; of George Powell, 
the tragedian, of brilliant and deplorable 
memory ; and of the handsome Hildebrand 
p 



226 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 

Horden, cut off by a violent death in the 
spring-time of his youth. Hildebrand 
Horden was the son of a clergyman of 
Twickenham and lived in the reign of 
William and Mary. Dramatic chronicles 
say that he was possessed of great talents 
as an actor, and of remarkable personal 
beauty. He was stabbed, in a quarrel, at 
the Rose Tavern ; and after he had been 
laid out for the grave, such was the lively 
feminine interest in his handsome person, 
many ladies came, some masked and others 
openly, to view him in his shroud. This 
is mentioned in Colley Cibber's Apology. 
Charles Coffey, the dramatist, author of 
The Devil upon Two Sticks, and other 
plays, lies in the vaults of St. Clement ; as 
likewise does Thomas Rymer, historiog- 
rapher for William III. , successor to Shad- 
well, and author of Fazdera, in seventeen 
volumes. In the church of St. Clement 
you may see the pew in which Dr. Johnson 
habitually sat when he attended divine 
service there. It was his favourite church. 
The pew is in the gallery ; and to those who 
honour the passionate integrity and fervent, 
devout zeal of the stalwart old champion of 
letters, it is indeed a sacred shrine. Henry 
Mossop, one of the stateliest of stately act- 



AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 227 

ors, perishing, by slow degrees, of penury 
and grief, — which he bore in proud silence, 

— found a refuge, at last, in the barren 
gloom of Chelsea churchyard. Theodore 
Hook, the cheeriest spirit of his time, the 
man who filled every hour of life with the 
sunshine of his wit and was wasted and 
degraded by his own brilliancy, rests, close 
by Bishop Sherlock, in Fulham churchyard, 

— one of the dreariest spots in the suburbs 
of London. Perhaps it does not much sig- 
nify, when once the play is over, in what 
oblivion our crumbling relics are hidden 
away. Yet to most human creatures these 
are sacred things, and many a loving heart, 
for all time to come, will choose a conse- 
crated spot for the repose of the dead, and 
will echo the tender words of Longfellow, 

— so truly expressive of a universal and 
reverent sentiment — 

" Take them, Grave, and let them lie 
Folded upon thy narrow shelves, 
As garments by the soul laid by 
And precious only to ourselves." 

One of the most impressive of the many 
literary pilgrimages that I have made was 
that which brought me to the house in 
which Coleridge died, and the place where 
he was buried. The student needs not to 



228 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 

be told that this poet, born in 1772, the 
year after Gray's death, bore the white 
lilies of pure literature till 1834, when he 
too entered into his rest. The last nineteen 
years of the life of Coleridge were spent in 
a house at Highgate; and there, within a 
few steps of each other, the visitor may be- 
hold his dwelling and his tomb. The house 
is one in a block of dwellings, situated 
in what is called the Grove — a broad, 
embowered street, a little way from the 
centre of the village. There are gardens 
attached to these houses, both in the front 
and the rear, and the smooth and peaceful 
roadside walks in the Grove itself are 
pleasantly shaded by elms of noble size 
and abundant foliage. These were young 
trees when Coleridge saw them, and all this 
neighbourhood, in his day, was but thinly 
settled. Looking from his chamber window 
he could see the dusky outlines of sombre 
London, crowned with the dome of St. 
Paul's on the southern horizon, while, more 
near, across a fertile and smiling valley, the 
gray spire of Hampstead church would 
bound his prospect, rising above the ver- 
dant woodland of Caen. 1 In front were 

1 " Come in the first stage, so as either to walk or 
to be driven in Mr. Gilman's gig, to Caen wood and 



AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 229 

beds of flowers, and all around ne might 
hear the songs of birds that tilled the fra- 
grant air with their happy, careless music. 
Not far away stood the old church of High- 
gate, long since destroyed, in which he used 
to worship, and close by was the Gate House 
inn, primitive, quaint, and cosy, which still 
is standing to comfort the weary traveller 
with its wholesome hospitality. Highgate, 
with all its rural peace, must have been a 
bustling place in the old times, for all the 
travel went through it that passed either 
into or out of London by the great north 
road, — that road in which Whittington 
heard the prophetic summons of the bells, 
and where may still be seen, suitably and 
rightly marked, the site of the stone on 
which he sat to rest. Here, indeed, the 
coaches used to halt, either to feed or to 
change horses, and here the many neglected 
little taverns still remaining, with their odd 
names and their swinging signs, testify to 
the discarded customs of a bygone age. 
Some years ago a new road was cut, so that 

its delicious groves and alleys, the finest in England, 
a grand cathedral aisle of giant lime-trees, Pope's 
favourite composition walk, when with the old Earl." 
— Coleridge to Crabb Robinson. Highgate, June 
1817. 



230 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 

travellers might wind around the hill, and 
avoid climbing the steep ascent to the vil- 
lage ; and since then the grass has begun 
to grow in the streets. But such bustle as 
once enlivened the solitude of Highgate 
could never have been otherwise than agree- 
able diversion to its inhabitants ; while for 
Coleridge himself, as we can well imagine, 
the London coach was welcome indeed, 
that brought to his door such well-loved 
friends as Charles Lamb, Joseph Henry- 
Green, Crabb Robinson, Wordsworth, or 
Talfourd. 

To this retreat the author of "The An- 
cient Mariner" withdrew in 1815, to live 
with his friend James Gilman, a surgeon, 
who had undertaken to rescue him from the 
demon of opium, but who, as De Quincey 
intimates, was lured by the poet into the 
service of the very fiend whom both had 
striven to subdue. It Was his last refuge, 
and he never left it till he was released from 
life. As you ramble in that quiet neigh- 
bourhood your fancy will not fail to con- 
jure up his placid figure, — the silver 
hair, the pale face, the great, luminous, 
changeful blue eyes, the somewhat portly 
form clothed in black raiment, the slow, 
feeble walk, the sweet, benignant manner, 



AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 23 1 

the voice that was perfect melody, and 
the inexhaustible talk that was the flow of 
a golden sea of eloquence and wisdom. 
Coleridge was often seen walking there, 
with a book in his hand ; and the children 
of the village knew him and loved him. 
His presence is impressed forever upon the 
place, to haunt and to hallow it. He was a 
very great man. The wings of his imagina- 
tion wave easily in the opal air of the high- 
est heaven. The power and majesty of his 
thought are such as establish forever in 
the human mind the conviction of personal 
immortality. Yet how forlorn the ending 
that this stately soul was enforced to make ! 
For more than thirty years he was the 
slave of opium. It blighted his home ; it 
alienated his wife ; it ruined his health ; 
it made him utterly wretched. u I have 
been, through a large portion of my later 
life," he wrote in 1834, "a sufferer, sorely 
afflicted with bodily pains, languor, and 
manifold infirmities.' ' But back of all this, 
— more dreadful still and harder to bear, — 
was he not the slave of some ingrained 
perversity of the mind itself, some helpless 
and hopeless irresolution of character, some 
enervating spell of that sublime yet pitiable 
dejection of Hamlet, which kept him for- 



232 AT THE GRAVE OF COLERIDGE. 

ever at war with himself, and, last of all, 
cast him out upon the homeless ocean of 
despair, to drift away into ruin and death? 
There are shapes more awful than his, in 
the records of literary history, — the ravaged, 
agonising form of Swift, for instance, and 
the wonderful, desolate face of Byron ; hut 
there is no figure more forlorn and pathetic. 
This way the memory of Coleridge came 
upon me, standing at his grave. He should 
have been laid in some wild, free place, 
where the grass could grow above him and 
the trees could wave their branches over 
his head. They placed him in a ponderous 
tomb, of gray stone, in Highgate church- 
yard, and in later times they have reared 
a new building above it, — the grammar- 
school of the village, — so that now the 
tomb, fenced round with iron, is in a cold, 
barren, gloomy crypt, accessible indeed 
from the churchyard, through several 
arches, but grim and doleful in all its sur- 
roundings ; as if the evil and cruel fate 
that marred his life were still triumphant 
over his ashes. 



ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 233 



XIX. 

ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 

IN England, as elsewhere, every historic 
spot is occupied ; and of course it some- 
times happens, at such a spot, that its asso- 
ciation is marred and its sentiment almost 
destroyed by the presence of the persons 
and the interests of to-day. The visitor to 
such places must carry with him not only 
knowledge and sensibility but imagination 
and patience. He will not find the way 
strewn with roses nor the atmosphere of 
poetry ready-made for his enjoyment. That 
atmosphere, indeed, for the most part — 
especially in the cities — he must himself 
supply. Relics do not robe themselves for 
exhibition. The Past is utterly indifferent 
to its worshippers. All manner of little 
obstacles, too, will arise before the pilgrim, 
to thwart him in his search. The mental 
strain and bewilderment, the inevitable 
physical weariness, the soporific influence 
of the climate, the tumult of the streets, 



234 ON J* AF.NET BATTLE-FIELD. 

the frequent and disheartening spectacle of 
poverty, squalor, and vice, the capricious 
and untimely rain, the inconvenience of 
long distances, the ill-timed arrival and 
consequent disappointment, the occasional 
nervous sense of loneliness and insecurity, 
the inappropriate boor, the ignorant, gar- 
rulous porter, the extortionate cabman, and 
the jeering bystander — all these must be 
regarded with resolute indifference by him 
who would ramble, pleasantly and profit- 
ably, in the footprints of English history. 
Everything depends, in other words, upon 
the eyes with which you observe and the 
spirit which you impart. Never was a 
keener truth uttered than in the couplet 
of Wordsworth — 

" Minds that have nothing to confer 
Find little to perceive." 

To the philosophic stranger, however, 
even this prosaic occupancy of historic 
places is not without its pleasurable, be- 
cause humorous, significance. Such an 
observer in England will sometimes be 
amused as well as impressed by a sudden 
sense of the singular incidental position 
into which — partly through the lapse of 
years, and partly through a peculiarity of 



ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 235 

national character — the scenes of famous 
events, not to say the events themselves, 
have gradually drifted. I thought of this 
one night, when, in Whitehall Gardens, 
I was looking at the statue of James the 
Second, and a courteous policeman came 
up and silently turned the light of his 
bull's-eye upon the inscription. A scene 
of more incongruous elements, or one sug- 
gestive of a more serio-comic contrast, 
could not be imagined. I thought of it 
again when standing on the village green 
near Barnet, and viewing, amid surround- 
ings both pastoral and ludicrous, the column 
which there commemorates the defeat and 
death of the great Earl of Warwick, and, 
consequently, the final triumph of the 
Crown over the last of the Barons of 
England. 

It was toward the close of a cool summer 
day, and of a long drive through the beau- 
tiful hedgerows of sweet and verdurous 
Middlesex, that I came to the villages of 
Barnet and Hadley, and went over the field 
of King Edward's victory, — that fatal, glo- 
rious field, on which Gloster showed such 
resolute valour, and where Neville, supreme 
and magnificent in disaster, fought on foot, 
to make sure that himself might go down 



236 OX BARXET BATTLE-FIELD. 

in the stormy death of all his hopes. More 
than four hundred years have drifted by 
since that misty April morning when the 
star of Warwick was quenched in blood, 
and ten thousand men were slaughtered to 
end the strife between the Barons and the 
Crown; yet the results of that conflict are 
living facts in the government of England 
now, and in the fortunes of her inhabitants. 
If you were unaware of the solid simplicity 
and proud reticence of the English char- 
acter, — leading it to merge all its shining 
deeds in one continuous fabric of achieve- 
ment, like jewels set in a cloth of gold, — 
you might expect to find this spot adorned 
with a structure of more than common 
splendour. What you actually do find 
there is a plain monolith, standing in the 
middle of a common, at the junction of 
several roads, — the chief of which are 
those leading to Hatfield and St. Albans, in 
Hertfordshire, — and on one side of this 
column you may read, in letters of faded 
black, the comprehensive statement that 
' ' Here was fought the famous battle be- 
tween Edward the Eourth and the Earl of 
Warwick, April 14th, anno 1471, in which 
the Earl was defeated and slain." 1 

1 The words "stick no bills" have been added, 
just below this inscription. 



ON BARNET BATTLE-FLELD. 237 

In my reverie, standing at the foot of 
this humble, weather-stained monument, I 
saw the long range of Barnet hills, mantled 
with grass and flowers and with the golden 
haze of a morning in spring, swarming 
with gorgeous horsemen and glittering with 
spears and banners ; and I heard the venge- 
ful clash of arms, the horrible neighing of 
maddened steeds, the furious shouts of on- 
set, and all the nameless cries and groans of 
battle, commingled in a thrilling yet hideous 
din. Here rode King Edward, intrepid, 
handsome, and stalwart, with his proud, 
cruel smile and his long yellow hair. There 
Warwick swung his great two-handed sword, 
and mowed his foes like grain. And there 
the fiery form of Richard, splendid in bur- 
nished steel, darted like the scorpion, deal- 
ing death at every blow ; till at last, in 
fatal mischance, the sad star of Oxford, 
assailed by its own friends, was swept out 
of the field, and the fight drove, raging, 
into the valleys of Hadley. How strangely, 
though, did this fancied picture contrast 
with the actual scene before me ! At a little 
distance, all around the village green, the 
peaceful, embowered cottages kept their 
sentinel watch. Over the careless, strag- 
gling grass went the shadow of the passing 



238 ON BARNET BATTLE-FIELD. 

cloud. Not a sound was heard, save the 
rustle of leaves and the low laughter of 
some little children, playing near the monu- 
ment. Close by and at rest was a flock of 
geese, couched upon the cool earth, and, as 
their custom is, supremely contented with 
themselves and all the world. And at the 
foot of the column, stretched out at his full 
length, in tattered garments that scarcely 
covered his nakedness, reposed the British 
labourer, fast asleep upon the sod. No more 
Wars of the Roses now ; but calm retire- 
ment, smiling plenty, cool western winds, 
and sleep and peace — 

" With a red rose and a white rose 
Leaniug, nodding at the wall." 



A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 239 



XX. 

A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 

ONE of the most impressive spots on 
earth, and one that especially teaches 
— with silent, pathetic eloquence and solemn 
admonition — the great lesson of contrast, 
the incessant now of the ages and the in- 
evitable decay and oblivion of the past, is 
the ancient city of Canterbury. Years and 
not merely days of residence there are essen- 
tial to the adequate and right comprehension 
of that wonderful place. Yet even an hour 
passed among its shrines will teach you, 
as no printed word has ever taught, the 
measureless power and the sublime beauty 
of a perfect religious faith ; while, as you 
stand and meditate in the shadow of the 
gray cathedral walls, the pageant of a 
thousand years of history will pass before 
you like a dream. The city itself, with its 
bright, swift river (the Stour), its opulence 
of trees and flowers, its narrow, winding 
streets, its numerous antique buildings, its 



24O A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 

many towers, its fragments of ancient wall 
and gate, its formal decorations, its air of 
perfect cleanliness and thoughtful gravity, 
its beautiful, umbrageous suburbs, — where 
the scarlet of the poppies and the russet 
red of the clover make one vast rolling sea 
of colour and of fragrant delight, — and, to 
crown all, its stately character of wealth 
without ostentation and industry without 
tumult, must prove to you a deep and satis- 
fying comfort. But, through all this, per- 
vading and surmounting it all, the spirit 
of the place pours in upon your heart, and 
floods your whole being with the incense 
and organ music of passionate, jubilant 
devotion. 

It was not superstition that reared those 
gorgeous fanes of worship which still adorn, 
even while they no longer consecrate, the 
ecclesiastic cities of the old world. In the 
age of Augustine, Dunstan, and Ethelnoth 
humanity had begun to feel its profound 
and vital need of a sure and settled reliance 
on religious faith. The drifting spirit, worn 
with sorrow, doubt, and self-conflict, longed 
to be at peace — longed for a refuge equally 
from the evils and tortures of its own con- 
dition and the storms and perils of the 
world. In that longing it recognised its 



A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 24 1 

immortality and heard the voice of its 
Divine Parent ; and out of the ecstatic joy 
and utter abandonment of its new-born, 
passionate, responsive faith, it built and 
consecrated those stupendous temples, — 
rearing them with all its love no less than 
all its riches and all its power. There was 
no wealth that it would not give, no toil 
that it would not perforin, and no sacrifice 
that it would not make, in the accomplish- 
ment of its sacred task. It was grandly, 
nobly, terribly in earnest, and it achieved 
a work that is not only sublime in its poetic 
majesty but measureless in the scope and 
extent of its moral and spiritual influence. 
It has left to succeeding ages not only a 
legacy of permanent beauty, not only a 
sublime symbol of religious faith, but an 
everlasting monument to the loveliness and 
greatness that are inherent in human na- 
ture. No creature with a human heart in 
his bosom can stand in such a building as 
Canterbury cathedral without feeling a 
greater love and reverence than he ever 
felt before, alike for God and man. 

On a day (July 27, 1882) when a 
class of the boys of the King's School 
of Canterbury was graduated the pres- 
ent writer chanced to be a listener to 
Q 



242 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 

the impressive and touching sermon that 
was preached before them, in the cathe- 
dral ; wherein they were tenderly admon- 
ished to keep unbroken their associations 
with their school-days and to remember 
the lessons of the place itself. That 
counsel must have sunk deep into every 
mind. It is difficult to understand how 
any person reared amid such scenes and 
relics could ever cast away their hallow- 
ing influence. Even to the casual visitor 
the bare thought of the historic treasures 
that are garnered in this temple is, by itself, 
sufficient to implant in the bosom a mem- 
orable and lasting awe. For more than 
twelve hundred years the succession of the 
Archbishops of Canterbury has remained 
substantially unbroken. There have been 
ninety-three "primates of all England," of 
whom fifty-three were buried in the cathe- 
dral, and here the tombs of fifteen of them 
are still visible. Here was buried the saga- 
cious, crafty, inflexible, indomitable Henry 
the Fourth, — that Hereford whom Shake- 
speare has described and interpreted with 
matchless, immortal eloquence, — and here, 
cut off in the morning of his greatness, and 
lamented to this day in the hearts of the 
English people, was laid the body of Edward 



A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 243 

the Black Prince, who to a dauntless valour 
and terrible prowess in war added a high- 
souled, human, and tender magnanimity 
in conquest, and whom personal virtues 
and shining public deeds united to make 
the ideal hero of chivalry. In no other way 
than by personal observance of such memo- 
rials can historic reading be invested with 
a perfect and permanent reality. Over the 
tomb of the Black Prince, with its fine re- 
cumbent effigy of gilded brass, hang the 
gauntlets that he wore ; and they tell you 
that his sword formerly hung there, but that 
Oliver Cromwell, — who revealed his icono- 
clastic and unlovely character in making a 
stable of this cathedral, — carried it away. 
Close at hand is the tomb of the wise, just, 
and gentle Cardinal Pole, simply inscribed 
"Blessed are the dead which die in the 
Lord" ; and you may touch a little, low 
mausoleum of gray stone, in which are the 
ashes of John Morton, that Bishop of Ely 
from whose garden in Holborn the straw- 
berries were brought for the Duke of Glos- 
ter, on the day when he condemned the 
accomplished Hastings, and who "fled to 
Richmond," in good time, from the stand- 
ard of the dangerous Protector. Standing 
there, I could almost hear the resolute, 



244 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 

scornful voice of Richard, breathing out, 
in clear, implacable accents — 

" Morton with Richmond touches me more 
near 
Than Buckingham and his rash-levied num- 
bers." 

The astute Morton, when Bosworth was 
over and Richmond had assumed the crown 
and Bourchier had died, was made Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury ; and as such, at a 
great age, he passed away. A few hundred 
yards from his place of rest, in a vault be- 
neath the Church of St. Dunstan, is the head 
of Sir Thomas More (the body being in St. 
Peter's, at the Tower of London), who in 
his youth had been a member of Morton's 
ecclesiastical household, and whose great- 
ness that prelate had foreseen and prophe- 
sied. Did no shadow of the scaffold ever 
fall across the statesman's thoughts, as he 
looked upon that handsome, manly boy, 
and thought of the troublous times that 
were raging about them? Morton, aged 
ninety, died in 1500 ; More, aged fifty-five, 
in 1535. Strange fate, indeed, was that, 
and as inscrutable as mournful, which gave 
to those who in life had been like father and 
son such a ghastly association in death ! 1 

1 St. Dunstan's church was connected with the 
Convent of St. Gregory. The Roper family, in the 



A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 245 

They show you the place where Becket 
was murdered, and the stone steps, worn 
hollow by the thousands upon thousands 
of devout pilgrims who, in the days before 
the Reformation, crept up to weep and 
pray at the costly, resplendent shrine of 
St. Thomas. The bones of Becket, as all 
the world knows, were, by command of 
Henry the Eighth, burnt, and scattered to 
the winds, while his shrine was pillaged 
and destroyed. Neither tomb nor scutcheon 
commemorates him here, — but the cathe- 
dral itself is his monument. There it stands, 
with its grand columns and glorious arches, 
its towers of enormous size and its long 
vistas of distance so mysterious and awful, 
its gloomy crypt where once the silver 
lamps sparkled and the smoking censers 
were swung, its tombs of mighty warriors 



time of Henry the Fourth, founded a chapel in it, in 
which are two marble tombs, commemorative of 
them, and underneath which is their burial vault. 
Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More's daughter, ob- 
tained her father's head, after his execution, and 
buried it here. The vault was opened in 1835, — 
when a new pavement was laid in the chancel of this 
church, — and persons descending into it saw the 
head, in a leaden box shaped like a beehive, open 
in front, set in a niche in the wall, behind an iron 
grill. 



246 A GLIMPSE OF CANTERBURY. 

and statesmen, its frayed and crumbling 
banners, and the eternal, majestic silence 
with which it broods over the love, ambi- 
tion, glory, defeat, and anguish of a thou- 
sand years, dissolved now and ended in a 
little dust ! As the organ music died away 
I looked upward and saw where a bird was 
wildly flying to and fro through the vast 
spaces beneath its lofty roof, in the vain 
effort to find some outlet of escape. Fit 
emblem, truly, of the human mind which 
strives to comprehend and to utter the 
meaning of this marvellous fabric ! 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 247 



XXI. 

THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

1882. 

NIGHT, in Stratford-on-Avon — a summer 
night, with large, solemn stars, a cool 
and fragrant breeze, and the stillness of 
perfect rest. From this high and grassy- 
bank I look forth across the darkened 
meadows and the smooth and shining river, 
and see the little town where it lies asleep. 
Hardly a light is anywhere visible. A few 
great elms, near by, are nodding and rus- 
tling in the wind, and once or twice a drowsy 
bird-note floats up from the neighbouring 
thicket that skirts the vacant, lonely road. 
There, at some distance, are the dim arches 
of Clopton's Bridge. In front — a graceful, 
shapely mass, indistinct in the starlight — 
rises the fair Memorial, Stratford's honour 
and pride. Further off, glimmering through 
the tree-tops, is the dusky spire of Trinity, 
keeping its sacred vigil over the dust of 
Shakespeare. Nothing here is changed. 
The same tranquil beauty, as of old, hallows 



248 THE SHRINES OP WARWICKSHIRE. 

this place ; the same sense of awe and mys- 
tery broods over its silent shrines of ever- 
lasting renown. Long and weary the years 
have been since last I saw it ; but to-night 
they are remembered only as a fleeting and 
troubled dream. Here, once more, is the 
highest and noblest companionship this 
world can give. Here, once more, is the 
almost visible presence of the one magician 
who can lift the soul out of the infinite 
weariness of common things and give it 
strength and peace. The old time has come 
back, and the bloom of the heart that I 
thought had all faded and gone. I stroll 
again to the river's brink, and take my 
place in the boat, and, trailing my hand 
in the dark waters of Avon, forget every 
trouble that ever I have known. 

It is often said, with reference to memo- 
rable places, that the best view always is 
the first view. No doubt the accustomed 
eye sees blemishes. No doubt the supreme 
moments of human life are few and come 
but once ; and neither of them is ever 
repeated. Yet frequently it will be found 
that the change is in ourselves and not in 
the objects we behold. Scott has glanced at 
this truth, in a few mournful lines, written 
toward the close of his heroic and beautiful 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 249 

life. Here at Stratford, however, I am not 
conscious that the wonderful charm of the 
place is in any degree impaired. The town 
still preserves its old-fashioned air, its 
quaintness, its perfect cleanliness and order. 
At the Shakespeare cottage, in the stillness 
of the room where he was born, the spirits 
of mystery and reverence still keep their 
imperial state. At the ancient grammar- 
school, with its pent-house roof and its dark 
sagging rafters, you still may see, in fancy, 
the unwilling schoolboy gazing upward ab- 
sently at the great, rugged timbers, or look- 
ing wistfully at the sunshine, where it 
streams through the little lattice windows 
of his prison. New Place, with its lovely 
lawn, its spacious garden, the ancestral 
mulberry and the ivy-covered well, will 
bring the poet before you, as he lived and 
moved in the meridian of his greatness. 
Cymbeline, The Tempest, and A Winter's 
Tale, the last of his works, undoubtedly 
were written here ; and this alone should 
make it a hallowed spot. Here he blessed 
his young daughter on her wedding day; 
here his eyes closed in the long last sleep ; 
and from this place he was carried to his 
grave in the chancel of Stratford church. 
I pass once again through the fragrant 



250 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

avenue of limes, the silent churchyard with 
its crumbling monuments, the dim porch, 
the twilight of the venerable temple, and 
kneel at last above the ashes of Shakespeare. 
What majesty in this triumphant rest ! 
All the great labour accomplished. The 
universal human heart interpreted with a 
living voice. The memory and the imagina- 
tion of mankind stored forever with words 
of sublime eloquence and images of immor- 
tal beauty. The noble lesson of self-con- 
quest — the lesson of the entire adequacy of 
the resolute, virtuous, patient human will — 
set forth so grandly that all the world must 
see its meaning and marvel at its splendour. 
And, last of all, death itself shorn of its 
terrors and made a trivial thing. 

There is a new custodian at New Place, 
and he will show you the little museum 
that is kept there — including the shovel- 
board from the old Falcon tavern across the 
way, on which the poet himself might have 
played — and he will lead you through the 
gardens, and descant on the mulberry and 
on the ancient and still unf orgiven vandal- 
ism of the Rev. Francis Gastrell, by whom 
the Shakespeare mansion was destroyed 
(1759), and will pause at the well, and at 
the fragments of the foundation, covered 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 25 1 

now with stout screens of wire. There is 
a fresh and fragrant beauty all about these 
grounds, an atmosphere of sunshine, life, 
comfort and elegance of state, that no 
observer can miss. This same keeper also 
has the keys of the guild chapel, opposite, 
on which Shakespeare looked from his win- 
dows and his garden, and in which he was 
the holder of two sittings. You will enter 
it by the same porch through which he 
walked, and see the arch and columns and 
tall, mullioned windows on which his gaze 
has often rested. The interior is cold and 
barren now, for the scriptural wall-paint- 
ings, discovered there in 1804, under a thick 
coating of whitewash, have been removed 
and the wooden pews, which are modern, 
have not yet been embrowned by age. Yet 
this church, known beyond question as one 
of Shakespeare's personal haunts, will hold 
you with the strongest tie of reverence and 
sympathy. At his birthplace everything 
remains unchanged. The gentle ladies who 
have so long guarded and shown it still 
have it in their affectionate care. The ceil- 
ing of the room in which the poet was born 
— the room that contains "the Actor's 
Pillar" and the thousands of signatures on 
walls and windows — is slowly crumbling 



252 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

to pieces. Every morning little particles 
of the plaster are found upon the floor. 
The area of tiny, delicate iron laths, to 
sustain this ceiling, has more than doubled 
since I last saw it, five years ago. It was 
on the ceiling that Lord Byron wrote his 
name, but this has flaked off and disap- 
peared. In the museum hall, once the 
Swan inn, they are forming a library ; and 
here you may see at least one Shakespear- 
ean relic of extraordinary interest. This 
is the MS. letter of Richard Quiney — whose 
son Thomas became in 1616 the husband of 
Shakespeare's youngest daughter, Judith 
— asking the poet for the loan of thirty 
pounds. It is enclosed between plates of 
glass in a frame, and usually kept covered 
with a cloth, so that the sunlight may not 
fade the ink. The date of this letter is 
October 25, 1508, and thirty English pounds 
then was a sum equivalent to about six 
hundred dollars of American money now. 
This is the only letter known to be in exist- 
ence that Shakespeare received. Miss Caro- 
line Chataway, the younger of the ladies 
who keep this house, will recite to you its 
text from memory — giving a delicious old- 
fashioned flavour to its quaint phraseology 
and fervent spirit, as rich and strange as the 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 253 

odour of the wild thyme and rosemary that 
grow in her garden beds. This antique 
touch adds a wonderful charm to the relics 
of the past. I found it once more when sit- 
ting in the chimmey-corner of Anne Hatha- 
way's kitchen ; and again in the lovely little 
church at Charlecote, where a simple, kindly 
woman, not ashamed to reverence the place 
and the dead, stood with me at the tomb of 
the Lucys, and repeated from memory the 
tender, sincere, and eloquent epitaph with 
which Sir Thomas Lucy thereon commemo- 
rates his wife. The lettering is small and 
indistinct on the tomb, but having often 
read it I well knew how correctly it was 
then spoken. Nor shall I ever read it again 
without thinking of that kindly, pleasant 
voice, the hush of the beautiful church, 
the afternoon sunlight streaming through 
the oriel window, and — visible through the 
doorway arch — the roses waving among the 
churchyard graves. 

In the days of Shakespeare's courtship, 
when he strolled across the fields to Anne 
Hathaway' s cottage at Shottery, his path, 
we may be sure, ran through wild pasture- 
land and tangled thicket. A fourth part 
of England at that time was a wilderness, 
and the entire population of that country 



254 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

did not exceed five millions of persons. The 
Stratford-on-Avon of to-day is still pos- 
sessed of some of its ancient features ; but 
the region round about it then must have 
been rude and wild in comparison with what 
it is at present. If you walk in the foot- 
path to Shottery now you will pass between 
low fences and along the margin of gardens, 
— now in the sunshine, and now in the 
shadow of larch and chestnut and elm, 
while the sweet air blows upon your face 
and the expeditious rook makes rapid wing 
to the woodland, cawing as he flies. In the 
old cottage, with its roof of thatch, its 
crooked rafters, its odorous hedges and 
climbing vines, its leafy well and its tan- 
gled garden, everything remains the same. 
Mrs. Mary Taylor Baker, the last living de- 
scendant of the Hathaway s, born in this 
house, always a resident here, and now an 
elderly woman, still has it in her keeping, 
and still displays to you the ancient carved 
bedstead in the garret, the wooden settle 
by the kitchen fireside, the hearth at which 
Shakespeare sat, the great blackened chim- 
ney with its adroit iron " fish -back " for the 
better regulation of the tea-kettle, and the 
brown and tattered Bible with the Hatha- 
way family record. Sitting in an old arm- 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 255 

chair, in the corner of Anne Hathaway' s 
bedroom, I could hear in the perfumed 
summer stillness, the low twittering of 
birds, whose nest is in the covering thatch 
and whose songs would awaken the sleeper 
at the earliest light of dawn. A better idea 
can be obtahied in this cottage than in 
either the birthplace or any other Shake- 
spearean haunt of what the real life actually 
was of the common people of England in 
Shakespeare's day. The stone floor and 
oak timbers of the Hathaway kitchen, 
stained and darkened in the slow decay of 
three hundred years, have lost no particle 
of their pristine character. The occupant 
of the cottage has not been absent from it 
more than a week during upward of half a 
century. In such a nook the inherited 
habits of living do not alter. " The thing 
that has been is the thing that shall be," 
and the customs of long ago are the customs 
of to-day. 

The Red Horse inn is in new hands now 
(William Gardner Colbourne having suc- 
ceeded his uncle Mr. Gardner), and it seems 
brighter than of old — without, however, 
having parted with either its antique furni- 
ture or its delightful antique ways. The 
old mahogany and wax-candle period has 



256 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

not ended yet in this happy place, and you 
sink to sleep on a snow-white pillow, soft 
as down and fragrant as lavender. One im- 
portant change is especially to be remarked. 
They have made a niche in a corner of 
Washington Irving' s parlour, and in it have 
placed his arm-chair, recushioned and pol- 
ished, and sequestered from touch by a 
large sheet of plate-glass. The relic may 
still be seen, but the pilgrim can sit upon it 
no more. Perhaps it might be well to en- 
shrine "Geoffrey Crayon's Sceptre" in a 
somewhat similar way. It could be fas- 
tened to a shield, displaying the American 
colours, and hung up in this storied room. 
At present it is the tenant of a starred and 
striped bag, and keeps its state in the seclu- 
sion of a bureau ; nor is it shown except 
upon request — like the beautiful marble 
statute of Donne, in his shroud, niched in 
the chancel wall of St. Paul's cathedral. 1 

1 A few effigies are all that remain of old St. 
Paul's. The most important and interesting of 
them is that shrouded statue of the poet John 
Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul's from 1621 to 
1631, dying in the latter year, aged 58. This is in 
the south aisle of the chancel, in a niche in the wall. 
You will not see it unless you ask the privilege. 
The other relics are in the crypt and in the church- 
yard. There is nothing to indicate the place of the 
grave of John of Gaunt or that of Sir Philip Sidney. 
Old St. Paul's was burned September 2, 1666. 



THE SHRIXES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 257 

One of the strongest instincts of the Eng- 
lish character is the instinct of permanence. 
It acts involuntarily, it pervades the national 
life, and, as Pope said of the universal soul, 
it operates unspent. Institutions seem to 
have grown out of human nature in this 
country, and are as much its expression as 
blossoms, leaves, and flowers are the ex- 
pression of inevitable law. A custom, in 
England, once established, is seldom or 
never changed. The brilliant career, the 
memorable achievement, the great char- 
acter, once fulfilled, takes a permanent 
shape in some kind of outward and visible 
memorial, some absolute and palpable fact, 
which thenceforth is an accepted part of the 
history of the land and the experience of its 
people. England means stability — the fire- 
side and the altar, home here and heaven 
hereafter ; and this is the secret of the 
power that she wields in the affairs of the 
world and the charm that she diffuses over 
the domain of thought. Such a temple as St. 
Paul's cathedral, such a palace as Hampton 
Court, such a castle as that of Windsor or 
that of Warwick, is the natural, sponta- 
neous expression of the English instinct of 
permanence ; and it is in memorials like 
these that England has written her history, 

R 



258 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

with symbols that can perish only with 
time itself. At intervals her latent animal 
ferocity breaks loose — as it did under Henry 
the Eighth, under Mary, under Cromwell, 
and under James the Second, — and for a 
brief time ramps and bellows, striving to 
deface and deform the surrounding struc- 
ture of beauty that has been slowly and 
painfully reared out of her deep heart and 
her sane civilisation. But the tears of 
human pity soon quench the fire of Smith- 
field, and it is only for a little while that 
the Puritan soldiers play at nine-pins in the 
nave of St. Paul's. This fever of animal 
impulse, this wild revolt of petulant impa- 
tience, is soon cooled ; and then the great 
work goes on again, as calmly and surely as 
before — that great work of educating man- 
kind to the level of constitutional liberty, in 
which England has been engaged for well- 
nigh a thousand years, and in which the 
American Republic, though sometimes at 
variance with her methods and her spirit, 
is, nevertheless, her follower and the con- 
sequence of her example. Our Declaration 
was made in 177(3 : the Declaration to the 
Prince of Orange is dated 1689, and the Bill 
of Rights in 1G28, while Magna Charta was 
secured in 1215. 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 259 

Throughout every part of this sumptuous 
and splendid domain of Warwickshire the 
symbols of English stability and the relics 
of historic times are numerous and deeply 
impressive. At Stratford the reverence of 
the nineteenth century takes its practical, 
substantial form, not alone in the honour- 
able preservation of the ancient Shake- 
spearean shrines, but in the Shakespeare 
Memorial. That fabric, though mainly due 
to the fealty of England, is also, to some 
extent, representative of the practical sym- 
pathy of America. Several Americans — 
Edwin Booth, Herman Vezin, M. D. Con- 
way, and W. H. Reynolds among them — 
are contributors to the fund that built it, 
and an American gentlewoman, Miss Kate 
Field, has worked for its cause with excel- 
lent zeal, untiring fidelity, and good results. 
(Miss Mary Anderson acted — 1885 — in the 
Memorial Theatre for its benefit, present- 
ing for the first time in her life the charac- 
ter of Rosalind. ) It is a noble monument. 
It stands upon the margin of the Avon, not 
distant from the church of the Holy Trinity, 
which is Shakespeare's grave ; so that these 
two buildings are the conspicuous points of 
the landscape, and seem to confront each 
other with sympathetic greeting, as if con- 



260 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

scious of their sacred trust. The vacant land 
adjacent, extending between the road and 
the river, is a part of the Memorial estate, 
and is to be converted into a garden, with 
pathways, shade-trees, and flowers, — by 
means of which the prospect will be made 
still fairer than now it is, and will be 
kept forever unbroken between the Memo- 
rial and the Church. Under this ample 
roof are already united a theatre, a library, 
and a hall of pictures. The drop-curtain, 
illustrating the processional progress of 
Queen Elizabeth when ' ' going to the Globe 
Theatre," is gay but incorrect. The divis- 
ions of seats are in conformity with the 
inconvenient arrangements of the London 
theatre of to-day. Queen Elizabeth heard 
plays in the hall of the Middle Temple, 
the hall of Hampton Palace, and at Green- 
wich and at Richmond ; but she never went 
to the Globe Theatre. In historic temples 
there should be no trifling with historic 
themes ; and surely, in a theatre of the 
nineteenth century, dedicated to Shake- 
speare, while no fantastic regard should be 
paid to the usages of the past, it would be 
tasteful and proper to blend the best of 
ancient ways with all the luxury and ele- 
gance of these times. It is much, however, 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 26 1 

to have built what can readily be made a 
lovely theatre ; and meanwhile, through the 
affectionate generosity of friends in all parts 
of the world, the library shelves are con- 
tinually gathering treasures, and the hall 
of paintings is growing more and more the 
imposing expository that it was intended to 
be of Shakespearean poetry and the history 
of the English stage. Many faces of actors 
appear upon these walls — from Garrick to 
Edmund Kean, from Macready to Henry 
Irving, from Kemble to Edwin Booth, 
from Mrs. Siddons to Mary Anderson. 
Prominent among the pictures is a spirited 
portrait of Garrick and his wife, playing at 
cards, wherein the lovely laughing lady 
archly discloses that her hands are full of 
hearts. Not otherwise, truly, is it with 
sweet and gentle Stratford herself, where 
peace and beauty and the most hallowed 
and hallowing of poetic associations garner 
up, forever and forever, the hearts of all 
mankind. 

In previous papers upon this subject I 
have tried to express the feelings that are 
excited by personal contact with the relics 
of Shakespeare — the objects that he saw 
and the fields through which he wandered. 
Fancy would never tire of lingering in this 



262 THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 

delicious region of flowers and of dreams. 
From the hideous vileness of the social con- 
dition of London in the time of James the 
First Shakespeare must indeed have re- 
joiced to depart into this blooming garden 
of rustic tranquillity. Here also he could 
find the surroundings that were needful to 
sustain him amid the vast and overwhelm- 
ing labours of his final period. No man, 
however great his powers, can ever, in this 
world, escape from the trammels under 
which nature enjoins and permits the exer- 
cise of the brain. Ease, in the intellectual 
life, is always visionary. The higher a 
man's faculties the higher are his ideals, — 
toward which, under the operation of a 
divine law, he must perpetually strive, but 
to the height of which he will never abso- 
lutely attain. So, inevitably, it was with 
Shakespeare. But, although genius cannot 
escape from itself and is no more free than 
the humblest toiler in the vast scheme of 
creation, it may — and it must — sometimes 
escape from the world : and this wise poet, 
of all men else, would surely recognise and 
strongly grasp the great privilege of solitude 
amid the sweetest and most soothing ad- 
juncts of natural beauty. That privilege 
he found in the sparkling and fragrant 



THE SHRINES OF WARWICKSHIRE. 263 

gardens of Warwick, the woods and fields 
and waters of Avon, where he had played 
as a boy, and where love had laid its first 
kiss upon his lips and poetry first opened 
upon his inspired vision the eternal glories 
of her celestial world. It still abides there, 
for every gentle soul that can feel its influ- 
ence — to deepen the glow of noble passion, 
to soften the sting of grief, and to touch the 
lips of worship with a fresh sacrament of 
patience and beauty. 



THE ANNE HATHAWAY COTTAGE. 

April, 1892. — A record that all lovers of 
the Shakespeare shrines have long wished to 
make can at last be made. The Anne Hatha- 
way Cottage has been bought for the British 
Nation, and that building will henceforth be 
one of the Amalgamated Trusts that are 
guarded by the corporate authorities of Strat- 
ford. The other Trusts are the Birthplace, 
the Museum, and New Place. The Mary 
Arden Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's 
mother, is yet to be acquired. 



264 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 



XXII. 
A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 



I must become a borrower of the night, 
For a dark hour or tivain." — Macbeth. 



MIDNIGHT has just sounded from the 
tower of St. Martin. It is a peaceful 
night, faintly lit with stars, and in the region 
round about Trafalgar Square a dream-like 
stillness broods over the darkened city, 
now slowly hushing itself to its brief and 
troubled rest. This is the centre of the 
heart of modern civilisation, the middle 
of the greatest city in the world — the vast, 
seething alembic of a grand future, the 
stately monument of a deathless past. 
Here, alone, in my quiet room of this old 
English inn, let me meditate a while on some 
of the scenes that are near me — the strange, 
romantic, sad, grand objects that I have 
seen, the memorable figures of beauty, 
genius, and renown that haunt this classic 
land. 



A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 265 

How solemn and awful now must be the 
gloom within the walls of the Abbey ! A 
walk of only a few minutes would bring me 
to its gates — the gates of the most renowned 
mausoleum on earth. No human foot to- 
night invades its sacred precincts. The dead 
alone possess it. I see, upon its gray walls, 
the marble figures, white and spectral, star- 
ing through the darkness. I hear the night- 
wind moaning around its lofty towers and 
faintly sobbing in the dim, mysterious 
spaces beneath its fretted roof. Here and 
there a ray of starlight, streaming through 
the sumptuous rose window, falls and lin- 
gers, in ruby or emerald gleam, on tomb, 
or pillar, or dusky pavement. Rustling 
noises, vague and fearful, float from those 
dim chapels where the great kings lie in 
state, with marble effigies recumbent above 
their bones. At such an hour as this, in 
such a place, do the dead come out of their 
graves ? The resolute, implacable Queen 
Elizabeth, the beautiful, ill-fated Queen of 
Scots, the royal boys that perished in the 
Tower, Charles the Merry and William the 
Silent — are these, and such as these, among 
the phantoms that fill the haunted aisles ? 
What a wonderful company it would be, 
for human eyes to behold ! And with what 



266 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 

passionate love or hatred, what amazement, 
or what haughty scorn, its members would 
look upon each other's faces, in this mirac- 
ulous meeting ? Here, through the glim- 
mering, icy waste, would pass before the 
watcher the august shades of the poets of 
five hundred years. Now would glide the 
ghosts of Chaucer, Spenser, Jonson, Beau- 
mont, Dryden, Cowley, Congreve, Addison, 
Prior, Campbell, Garrick, Burke, Sheridan, 
Newton, and Macaulay — children of divine 
genius, that here mingled with the earth. 
The grim Edward, who so long ravaged 
Scotland ; the blunt, chivalrous Henry, who 
conquered France ; the lovely, lamentable 
victim at Pomfret, and the harsh, haughty, 
astute victor at Bosworth; James with his 
babbling tongue, and William with his im- 
passive, predominant visage — they would 
all mingle with the spectral multitude and 
vanish into the gloom. Gentler faces, too, 
might here once more reveal their loveliness 
and their grief — Eleanor de Bohun, broken- 
hearted for her murdered lord ; Elizabeth 
Claypole, the meek, merciful, beloved daugh- 
ter of Cromwell ; Matilda, Queen to Henry 
the First, and model of every grace and 
virtue ; and sweet Anne Neville, destroyed 
— as many think — by the politic craft 



A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 267 

of Gloster. Strange sights, truly, in the 
lonesome Abhey to-night ! 

In the sombre crypt beneath St. Paul's 
cathedral how thrilling now must be the 
heavy stillness ! No sound can enter there. 
No breeze from the upper world can stir the 
dust upon those massive sepulchres. Even 
in day-time that shadowy vista, with its 
groined arches and the black tombs of 
Wellington and Nelson and the ponderous 
funeral-car of the Iron Duke, is seen with 
a shudder. How strangely, how fearfully 
the mind would be impressed, of him who 
should wander there to-night ! What sub- 
lime reflections would be his, standing beside 
the ashes of the great admiral, and think- 
ing of that fiery, dauntless spirit — so sim- 
ple, resolute, and true — who made the 
earth and the seas alike resound with the 
splendid tumult of his deeds. Somewhere 
beneath this pavement is the dust of Sir 
Philip Sidney — buried here before the de- 
struction of the old cathedral, in the great 
fire of 1666 — and here, too, is the nameless 
grave of the mighty Duke of Lancaster, 
John of Gaunt. Shakespeare was only 
twenty-two years old when Sidney fell, at 
the battle of Zutphen, and, being then resi- 
dent in London, he might readily have seen, 



268 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 

and doubtless did see, the splendid funeral 
procession with which the body of that 
heroic gentleman — radiant and immortal 
example of perfect chivalry — was borne to 
the tomb. Hither came Henry of Hereford 
— returning from exile and deposing the 
handsome, visionary, useless Richard — to 
mourn over the relics of his father, dead 
of sorrow for his son's absence and his 
country's shame. Here, at the venerable 
age of ninety-one, the glorious brain of 
Wren found rest at last, beneath the stu- 
pendous temple that himself had reared. 
The watcher in the crypt to-night would 
see, perchance, or fancy that he saw, those 
figures from the storied past. Beneath this 
roof — the soul and the perfect symbol of 
sublimity ! — are ranged more than four- 
score monuments to heroic martial persons 
who have died for England, by land or sea. 
Hsre, too, are gathered in everlasting re- 
pose the honoured relics of men who were 
famous in the arts of peace. Reynolds and 
Opie, Lawrence and West, Landseer, Tur- 
ner, Cruikshank, and many more, sleep 
under the sculptured pavement where now 
the pilgrim walks. For fifteen centuries a 
Christian church has stood upon this spot, 
and through it has poured, with organ strains 



A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 269 

and glancing lights, an endless procession 
of prelates and statesmen, of poets and war- 
riors and kings. Surely this is hallowed and 
haunted ground ! Surely to him the spirits 
of the mighty dead would he very near, 
who — alone, in the darkness — should stand 
to-night within those sacred walls, and hear, 
beneath that awful dome, the mellow thun- 
der of the bells of God. 

How looks, to-night, the interior of the 
chapel of the Foundling hospital ? Dark 
and lonesome, no doubt, with its heavy gal- 
leries and sombre pews, and the great organ 
— Handel 1 s gift — standing there, mute and 
grim, between the ascending tiers of empty 
seats. But never, in my remembrance, will 
it cease to present a picture more impressive 
and touching than words can say. Scores 
of white-robed children, rescued from shame 
and penury by this noble benevolence, were 
ranged around that organ when I saw it, 
and, in their artless, frail little voices, sing- 
ing a hymn of praise and worship. Well-nigh 
one hundred and fifty years have passed 
since this grand institution of charity — the 
sacred work and blessed legacy of Captain 
Thomas Coram — was established in this 
place. What a divine good it has accom- 
plished, and continues to accomplish, and 



270 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 

what a pure glory hallows its founder's 
name ! Here the poor mother, betrayed 
and deserted, may take her child and find 
for it a safe and happy home and a chance 
in life — nor will she herself be turned 
adrift without sympathy and help. The 
poet and novelist George Croly was once 
chaplain of the Foundling hospital, and he 
preached some noble sermons there ; but 
these were thought to be above the compre- 
hension of his usual audience, and he pres- 
ently resigned the place. Sidney Smith 
often spoke in this pulpit, when a young 
man. It was an aged clergyman who 
preached there within my hearing, and I 
remember he consumed the most part of an 
hour in saying that a good way in which to 
keep the tongue from speaking evil is to 
keep the heart kind and pure. Better than 
any sermon, though, was the spectacle of 
those poor children, rescued out of their 
helplessness and reared in comfort and 
affection. Several fine works of art are 
owned by this hospital and shown to visi- 
tors — paintings by Gainsborough and Rey- 
nolds, and a portrait of Captain Coram, by 
Hogarth. May the turf lie lightly on him, 
and daisies and violets deck his hallowed 
grave ! No man ever did a better deed 



A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 27 1 

than he, and the darkest night that ever 
was cannot darken his fame. 

How dim and silent now are all those 
narrow and dingy little streets and lanes 
around Paul's churchyard and the Temple, 
where Johnson and Goldsmith loved to 
ramble ! More than once have I wandered 
there, in the late hours of the night, meet- 
ing scarce a human creature, but conscious 
of a royal company indeed, of the wits and 
poets and players of a far-off time. Dark- 
ness now, on busy Smithfield, where once 
the frequent, cruel flames of bigotry shed 
forth a glare that sickened the light of clay. 
Murky and grim enough to-night is that 
grand processional walk in St. Bartholo- 
mew's church, where the great gray pillars 
and splendid Norman arches of the twelfth 
century are mouldering in neglect and decay. 
Sweet to fancy and dear in recollection, the 
old church comes back to me now, with the 
sound of children's voices and the wail of 
the organ strangely breaking on its pensive 
rest. Stillness and peace over arid Bunhill 
Fields — the last haven of many a Puritan 
worthy, and hallowed to many a pilgrim as 
the resting-place of Bunyan and of Watts. 
In many a park and gloomy square the 
watcher now would hear only a rustling of 



272 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 

leaves or the fretful twitter of half -awakened 
birds. Around Primrose Hill and out toward 
Hampstead many a night-walk have I taken, 
that seemed like rambling in a desert — so 
dark and still are the walled houses, so per- 
fect is the solitude. In Drury Lane, even 
at this late hour, there would be some 
movement ; but cold and dense as ever the 
shadows are resting on that little graveyard 
behind it where Lady Dedlock went to die. 
To walk in Bow Street now, — might it not 
be to meet the shades of Waller and Wycher- 
ley and Betterton, who lived and died there ; 
to have a greeting from the silver-tongued 
Barry ; or to see, in draggled lace and ruffles, 
the stalwart figure and flushed and royster- 
ing countenance of Henry Fielding? Very 
quiet now are those grim stone chambers 
in the terrible Tower of London, where so 
many tears have fallen and so many no- 
ble hearts been split with sorrow. Does 
Brackenbury still kneel in the cold, lonely, 
vacant chapel of St. John ; or the sad ghost 
of Monmouth hover in the chancel of St. 
Peter's ? How sweet to-night would be 
the rustle of the ivy on the dark walls of 
Hadley church, where late I breathed the 
rose-scented air and heard the warbling 
thrush, and blessed, with a grateful heart, 



A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 273 

the loving kindness that makes such beauty 
in the world ! Out there on the hillside of 
Highgate, populous with death, the star- 
light gleams on many a ponderous tomb 
and the white marble of many a sculptured 
statue, where dear and famous names will 
lure the traveller's footsteps for years to 
come. There Lyndhurst rests, in honour 
and peace, and there is hushed the tuneful 
voice of Dempster — never to be heard any 
more, either when snows are flying or 
"when green leaves come again." Not 
many days have passed since I stood there, 
by the humble gravestone of poor Charles 
Harcourt, and remembered all the gentle en- 
thusiasm with which, five years ago (1877), 
he spoke to me of the character of Jacques 
— which he loved — and how well he re- 
peated the immortal lines upon the drama 
of human life. For him the "strange, 
eventful history ' ' came early and suddenly 
to an end. In that ground, too, I saw the 
sculptured medallion of the well-beloved 
George Honey — " all his frolics o'er " and 
nothing left but this. Many a golden mo- 
ment did we have, old friend, and by me 
thou art not forgotten ! The lapse of a few 
years changes the whole face of life ; but 
nothing can ever take from us our memo- 



274 A BORROWER OF THE NIGHT. 

ries of the past. Here, around me, in the 
still watches of the night, are the faces that 
will never smile again, and the voices that 
will speak no more — Sothern, with his sil- 
ver hair and bright and kindly smile, from 
the spacious cemetery of Southampton ; and 
droll Harry Beckett and poor Adelaide 
Neilson from dismal Brompton. And if I 
look from yonder window I shall not see 
either the lions of Landseer or the homeless 
and vagrant wretches who sleep around 
them ; but high in her silver chariot, sur- 
rounded with all the pomp and splendour 
that royal England knows, and marching to 
her coronation in Westminster Abbey, the 
beautiful figure of Anne Boleyn, with her 
dark eyes full of triumph and her torrent 
of golden hair flashing in the sun. On 
this spot is written the whole history of 
a mighty empire. Here are garnered up 
such loves and hopes, such memories and 
sorrows, as can never be spoken. Pass, ye 
shadows ! Let the night wane and the 
morning break. 



THE WORKS OF 

William Winter. 



SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND. i8mo, Cloth, 75 

Cents. 
GRAY DAYS AND GOLD. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 
WANDERERS : A Collection of Poems. i8mo, 

Cloth, 75 Cents. 
SHADOWS OF THE STAGE. i8mo, Cloth, 75 

Cents. {In the Press.) 
OLD SHRINES AND IVY. i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 

(/« the Press.) 

THE PRESS AND THE STAGE: An Oration. 

Delivered before the Goethe Society, at the Bruns- 
wick Hotel, New York, January 28, 1889. 8vo, 
Cloth, $1.50. 



" The supreme need of this age in America is a 
practical conviction that progress does not consist in 
material prosperity, but in spiritual advancement. 
Utility has long been exclusively worshipped. The 
welfare of the future lies in the worship of beauty. To 
that worship these pages are devoted, with all that im- 
plies of sympathy with the higher instincts, and faith in 
the divine destiny of the human race." — From the 
Preface to Gray Days and Gold. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(1) 



WORKS BY WILLIAM WINTER. 



Two New Volumes, 

UNIFORM WITH 

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND and GRAY 
DAYS AND GOLD. 



Shadows of the Stage 

{Shortly). 

Old Shrines and Ivy 

{In the Press). 



" Mr. Winter has long been known as the foremost 
of American dramatic critics, as a writer of very charm- 
ing verse, and as a master in. the lighter veins of 
English prose." — Chicago Herald. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(2) 



SHAKESPEARE'S 

ENGLAND. 

i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 



"... It was the author's wish, in dwelling thus 
upon the rural loveliness, and the literary and historical 
associations of that delightful realm, to afford sympa- 
thetic guidance and useful suggestion to other Ameri- 
can travellers who, like himself, might be attracted to 
roam among the shrines of the mother-land. Tempera- 
ment is, the explanation of style; and he has written 
thus of England because she has filled his mind with 
beauty and his heart with mingled joy and sadness; 
and surely some memory of her venerable ruins, her 
ancient shrines, her rustic glens, her gleaming rivers, 
and her flower-spangled meadows will mingle with the 
last thoughts that glimmer through his brain when the 
shadows of the eternal night are falling and the ramble 
of life is done." — From the Preface. 

" He offers something more than guidance to the 
American traveller. He is a convincing and eloquent 
interpreter of the august memories and venerable sanc- 
tities of the old country." — Saturday Review. 

" The book is delightful reading." — Scribner's 
Monthly. 

" Enthusiastic and yet keenly critical notes and com- 
ments on English life and scenery." — Scotsman. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(3) 



GRAY DAYS 

AND GOLD. 

i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 



CONTENTS. 

Classic Shrines. 

Haunted Glens and Houses. 
The Haunts of Moore. Old York. 

Beautiful Bath. 

The Lakes and Fells of Wordsworth. 
Shakespeare Relics at Worcester. 

Byron and Hucknall Torkard. 

Historic Nooks and Corners. 
Up and Down the Avon. Shakespeare's Town. 

Rambles in Arden. 

The Stratford Fountain. 
Bosworth Field. 

The Home of Dr. Johnson. 
From London to Edinburgh. 
Into the Highlands. 

Highland Beauties. 

The Heart of Scotland. 
Elegiac Memorials. Sir Walter Scott. 

Scottish Pictures. 

Imperial Ruins. 

The Land of Marmion. 

At Vesper Time. 

This book, which is intended as a companion to 
Shakespeare's England, relates to the gray days of an 
American wanderer in the British Isles, and to the gold 
of thought and fancy that can be found there. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(4) 



GRAY DAYS 

AND GOLD. 

i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 



PRESS NOTICES. 

"Mr. Winter's graceful and meditative style in his 
English sketches ha- recommended his earlier volume 
upon (Shakespeare's) England to many readers, who 
will not need urging to make the acquaintance of this 
companion book, in which the traveller guides us 
through the quiet and romantic scenery of the mother- 
country with a mingled affection and sentiment of 
which we have had no example since Irving's day." — 
The Nation. 

" As friendly and good-humoured a book on English 
scenes as any American has written since Washington 
Irving." — Daily News, London. 

"Much that is bright and best in our literature is 
brought once more to our dulled memories. Indeed, 
we know of but few volumes containing so much of 
observation, kindly comment, philosophy, and artistic 
weight as this unpretentious little book." — Chicago 
Herald. 

" They who have never visited the scenes which Mr. 
Winter so charmingly describes will be eager to do so 
in order to realize his fine descriptions of them, and they 
who have already visited them will be incited by his 
eloquent recital of their attractions to repeat their 
former pleasant experiences." — Public Ledger, 
Philadelphia. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(5) 



WANDERERS ; 



BEING 



A Collection of the Poems of William Winter. 

i8mo, Cloth, 75 Cents. 



"But it has seemed to the author of these poems — 
which of course are offered as absolutely impersonal 
— that they are the expression of various representative 
moods of human feeling and various representative 
aspects of human experience, and that therefore they 
may possibly possess the inherent right to exist." — 
From the Preface. 

" The verse of Mr. Winter is dedicated mainly to 
love and wine, to flowers and birds and dreams, to the 
hackneyed and never-to-be-exhausted repertory of the 
old singers. His instincts are strongly conservative; his 
confessed aim is to belong to ' that old school of English 
Lyrical Poetry, of which gentleness is the soul, and 
simplicity the garment.' " — Saturday Review. 

" The poems have a singular charm in their graceful 
spontaneity." — Scots Observer. 

"Free from cant and rant — clear cut as a cameo, 
pellucid as a mountain brook. It may be derided as 
trite, borne, unimpassioned; but in its own modest 
sphere it is, to our thinking, extraordinarily successful, 
and satisfies us far more than the pretentious mouthing 
which receives the seal of over-hasty approbation." — 
Athe7icenm. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

112 Fourth Avenue, NEW YORK. 

(6) 

H 313 85 




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